Camping, Kayaking and Fossil Hunting Adventures

 Found my first fossilized or heavily mineralized horse teeth during a Long Beach walk today.

 This was a nice end to an otherwise cold and dreary day. It appears to be a heavily mineralized distal end of a horse astragalus. I am always thrilled to find pieces of fossilized horse. This is my 3rd horse find on Mcfaddin Beach and interesting enough the horse and giant sloth have been my only fossilized finds over my 3 weeks of walking this beach. 

I have been looking for a small bike that I could easily maneuver and also load onto a trailer.    Everything is a compromise and I think this little bike is a good compromise. This 5 speed carburetor fueled 275lb bike hasn’t changed much in 30 years which speaks to the success of the TW200. It’s a great combo beach and trail bike. The seat height is only 31” so it is easy to mount and dismount. Extra wide knobby tires keep me upright in beach sand and gravel. They really dig into the dirt trails too. During the course of my beach travels the front and rear tires have both slipped to the side in deep sand and gravel. It took me a while to be comfortable with it. I was concerned that the tires would slip out from under me and I would go down but it didn’t happen.  This bike has a real granny gear and I found that with some practice I could balance the bike at 3mph. It enabled me to go along the beach at a speed slow enough to spot larger fossils and fishing tackle over long distances. 

 I have been walking Mcfaddin Beach on the Texas Gufl Shore. The condition of this beach is very disappointing. The amount of garbage that I see on this beach is disgusting. Most appears to have been left by beach goers. I would not visit this beach to enjoy the sun or the sand. I have also seen remnants of dozens of Mylar balloons, thousand of yard of nylon rope amd fishing line, oil filters, discarded tents, etc. There is plastic in almost every square foot of soil.

 The artifacts and fossils are still covered by sand. Spent half the day fishing and we caught a 28” redfish. 

 The sand is still covering most of my bone hunting spots and it is a bit of a hazy dreary day. So I am just going to share some pics of a past find. I was living on the South Pacific island of Saipan for several years and I explored the jungles and spelunkers the caves looking for WWII relics. This is a Super Constellation B-29 that we found in the jungle. It had apparently hit the mountain and disintegrated. We found 3 of the radial engines. Everything else was buried under jungle vegetation.

 Looks like it is going to be a nice day. 68° for a high with a bit of occasional rain. Planning on doing some surf fishing with friends and then spending several hours looking for bones and maybe an artifact.

 The photos were taken during a 2 month excavation of my Giant sloth. The location was approx 10’ above the river bed amd 30’ below the original surface. The river banks were clay and it was very difficult to carve away the layers.  I found that the bones were in very poor shape and I spent a lot of time stabilizing them with glue. Near the end of the excavation I enclose the bone and a lot of matrix inside of plaster field jackets for transport. I learned a lot about conservation and transport of fossils during this looong excavation. The photos loaded out of order.  This when I was well into the excavation and shows you some perspective of the area that I was working in. This is what was on the surface when it was first discovered. It is clearly a Giant Sloth vertebrae. At that time I had no idea of what was about to come. This is well into the excavation and at the time I was trying to figure out how to transport it. It really decided for me as it broke into 3 large pieces of about

 Another day on the beach amd the clay where I hunt for my fossils is covered in samd. I have some videos of this but I am not in an area where I can load them. Fishing was also poor. Here are a couple of photos of some of my past finds. The top photo is Giant Sloth amd the rest are bison.

 A beautiful sunset ends the day. Time for supper and I am breaking in my new Instant Pot with a 3lb Whole chicken. J

 The seas were rough with a lot of sand thrown up. It covers the clay where I look for bones and artifacts. Fortunately I found a nice fossil Giant sloth rib. The identification is not conclusive but the only possibilities are giant sloth and mammoth. It is the right size and feel for sloth so I think that is the likeliest species. I have also found two other pieces over the past week.  We failed miserably at fishing because of the strong rip tide but we did manage to net a few mullet which we will use for bait tomorrow. We have been using frozen shad and mullet over the past couple of weeks because the cold weather have kept the mullet deep.

 It’s about 36° but the wind has really died down so that’s welcome. Looks like we have a couple of Boondocker’s on the beach this morning and both of those rigs are pretty cool so I will share them here with you.

  I woke up at 2:30 am and am thinking about what the beaches are going to look like today. Hoping that the waves and tides will bring in some fossils. The winds have been very gusty and the weather unusually cold during the past several months of my stay in Texas. This has really hampered my ability to get out and find goofossils.

 During the next couple of months I will be sharing my experiences while discovering many ice age fossils.  This is the largest complete bison skull that I have had the good fortune to find. The horn span is 29.5”.

 On the first day of my blog I am camping in the small Texas town of High Island. I have been here for approx 2 weeks enjoying the moderate weather and exploring the Crystal Beach area. So far I have had only a little success in finding the paleo fossils that this area is known for. My fishing success has been much better and I am catching a couple of large redfish.  My plans are to remain here until the first week in March and then start moving north in the hopes of getting my kayak in the water and trying my luck amd finding more paleo bones.