Rock Hounds!

We had the most amazing day yesterday! We got up at 5:30 (yes...on a Saturday) and left the house at 6:15 to meet up with a group of people that JT knows from work. (Russ works for the company that JT used to work for, and Dr. Checketts and some of his office staff). We drove out to the boonies in Wyoming where we had made arrangements to dig for fossils on some private property. It was one of the coolest things I have ever done. The rock is sandstone and is in layers. You chip the layers apart with a hammer and chisel and there are fish, manta rays and plants inside the layers of the rock. We found some amazing things and now have to get them cleaned up (you have to take a dental pick and get all the sediment off of the fossil) and then we can display some of them in our home. VERY COOL!

This is one of the fossils we found!

The guy who owns the property is working on excavating these palm fronds. He keeps them covered and when he gets them removed from the side of the cliff he will probably be able to sell them for at least $20,000!

We then went with Russ to another area of the state and met up with another group of work associates. We drove to an area that has fossilized turtles. They have been under much looser soil and are broken into bits, but it is really amazing to see and the pieces are very interesting. As the ground has eroded it has exposed the fossilized turtles and as you can see in the photo below, a lot of them were in little circles on top of the mounds of dirt. You can see the texture of the shell, the spongey material it is made of and even find bones mixed in. We also found Gar fish scales, which after millions of years are still shiney. The area was a lake about 45 million years ago.

When we were done we went back to the home of Dr. Noe, who was the one that took us out to find the turtles, and he showed us some of his other fossils and rocks. The photo below shows him with a turtle shell that he found. It was in pieces just like the ones we saw, but he found every piece and put it back together. He was such a kind man. He gave me a very cool piece of petrified wood that he has polished and it is just beautiful. I will always treasure it.

And one of Bri's highlights was when she got to drive a quad!

We had a fun adventure and are kind of bitten by a rock hound bug...now I want to find more!