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My Latest Hunts!

  
I FREQUENTLY FIND FOSSILS WHILE HUNTING POINTS . . .
In our creekbeds, we find a lot of Cretaceous marine fauna and some Pleistocene stuff. I've made several nice finds over the years. Here are some of the better ones.
THE FAMOUS GCS MOSASAUR SKULL
In October 1977, I took my seventh grade Texas History class on a field trip to the river to study Indian artifacts and fossils. The day was going pretty slowly when I saw this bad boy protruding from the shale in the bottom of the river. As you can imagine, I got a little excited!
After a little cleaning of the gravel,
it became apparent that the entire skull was there, upside down, with both lower mandibles detached and lying a few inches away. What a find!
The final reconstruction

In 2005, SMU paleontologist Mike Polcyn borrowed the skull.  He corrected some errors in the original reconstruction and made a cast of the skull for the SMU collection.  He then returned the original bones, and an excellent cast, to our school for display.
I'VE NEVER FOUND ANOTHER INTACT SKULL . . .

But I do occasionally find bits and pieces, such as this nice jaw section I found in 2007.
My biggest mosasaur vertebrae yet -
I found this on Jan. 24, 2001. The piece next to it is a partial upper jaw hinge, as long as my foot.
A nice set of mosasaur vertebrae
I found this set of 27 tylosaurus tail vertebrae around Christmas 2000. Several of them still had the neural arches attached. Excuse the messy kitchen table!
THIS IS MY RAREST FOSSIL EVER. . .
It is the skull of a Pleistocene musk ox (Symbos cavifrons), recovered from the clay banks of the river in about 1991. Harold Finley and I found it, John Schultz excavated it, and today it resides in the Fort Worth Museum of Natural History.