Winter

Winter

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Mudball and Sharks Teeth

I was taking pictures and the mud ball has grown to such enormous size I thought it was time to give another update.

You can't really tell it's size until I get Sasha to sit next to it. It takes both boys  to roll it over to keep putting mud on it. Here is one with Sasha so you have a better idea now.

When I was taking the picture It amazed me to see that it is so much bigger than the dog now. She just thinks I am crazy to make her sit here while I take the picture. I can never get her to look at me. She had to even fake she had seen a cat at the back of the pasture and ran off so I couldn't get any more pictures. There was no cat.

Shark's Teeth.

I was cleaning out a cupboard in the garage and I ran across our bucket of shark's teeth. Since this place I live must have been underwater and all around the hills around here you can dig and find all sorts of treasure like this. I might not of even thought about it but I was looking at a catalog and you could buy bags of small sharks teeth and I thought they were pretty expensive for something you can find here if you know where to look.
We have a hill that when we were kids, if your parents were so inclined could take you and you could dig them. Then a man bought the hill and scraped of the top layer to get down to the bone bed and now it isn't as much work to dig them but you have to jump through lots of hoops to dig there.

I am not much of a hoop jumping sort of person. I wanted the kids to have the experience of digging for shark's teeth one year. So we grabbed shovels and buckets and took the kids up into the hills and came upon a place that looked good.

I know you can't tell very well, but instead of shark's teeth we found this whale vertebrae. It is huge and as Ron dug some more he came to the whale disks.




This is a whale tooth. It is as big as the palm of my hand.

This is bits of bone all petrified.

This is a sea lion tooth.

This is bits of some kind of tooth but we never could identify it.

When it rains here if you want to go out to the park that is out there you can take a walk down the river bank and there will be shark's teeth that get washed down out of the hills.

Now the day when we went to dig it was late in the day so it would be a bit cooler. As we were digging in the dirt we came upon a interesting thing. I don't know if you have or will ever hear this from anyone but me.
The reason we stopped digging and never went back, was next to all of these bones and fragments, Ron got into a section of ground where the bones were not petrified. They were still bone, and they smelled of rotting. Well me being the Mom panicked. Ron called for me to come and see it. In the same hole was putrefied and soft bone. Together. Same whale.

This is the second whale disk and I just love how old it looks and how worn it looks.

The kids and Ron have dug trilobites in Oklahoma.. The only thing that is on our list of things to do someday is to go dig dinosaur bones.  Our oldest daughter and Ron used to volunteer at a museum here and they would get to use tools to scrape dirt of giant sea turtles and all kinds of sea creatures that were buried long ago.

I just thought I would share something different today. As my husband always says, There is treasure everywhere.

Have a wonderful day,
~Kim~

26 comments:

Buttons Thoughts said...

Oh Kim what an incredible thing for your kids to enjoy. I would be out there with my kids all the time. Love the finds and that huge mud ball. Wish I lived closer you could not keep me away:) Enjoy. Treasure everywhere has always been my motto and you have certainly shown that to be true. B

Debbie said...

interesting stuff today kim!!

love the sunflower header also, brilliant!!

Nellie said...

What an interesting adventure! Around here, we would just hope we could find an arrowhead, but that would rarely happen. xo Nellie

Christine said...

How cool to live so close to a rel natural history museum! Those are amazing treasures and what about that mudball? Huge!

Sarah said...

What a fun thing to do; I know my kids would love to do something similar. Weird about the whale bones; I wonder how that could be explained?

Mary Ann said...

Oh my gosh, I wouldn't even know where to look to find all the neat things that you have found! LOVE THAT MUDBALL~

Beth said...

Sounds like a perfect adventure. No shark's teeth to be found around here. Indian relics every now and then.

dixiesamplar said...

How interesting, Kim! My friend, Lynn, is a science teacher...I bet she would love to read this post.

Sarah said...

Thank you, Kim for your comment over on my space. I am with you! My kids already recoil when they here something as being "millions of years old". Won't it be delightful when we have the new heavens and earth and have all our questions answered? Have a great afternoon....I'm hovering over my stove concocting lotion bars and body butters for an open house at a shop this weekend where my things are for sale!

http://bitsandpieces-sonja.blogspot.com/ said...

You need to come and visit Texas, and dig for dinosaur bones in Glen Rose, east of here. They have bones, footprints, the whole thing! Pretty fascinating stuff.

http://bitsandpieces-sonja.blogspot.com/ said...

iips, Glen Rose is WEST of us, west and south of Ft.Worth.

http://bitsandpieces-sonja.blogspot.com/ said...

oh BROTHER!! Third time is the charm... make that iips... OOPS! Anyway, I would love it if you visited us in Texas, I'll even go and dig with you! :)

TexWisGirl said...

those relics are really cool! and i laugh every time you feature the mud ball! so funny!

Coloring Outside the Lines said...

I'm still wondering what's up with the mudball- how fun! Of course, we have no mud..since it REFUSES to rain down here. LOL! I find arrowheads here and there on our land after a good gully washer...but it's been a long time. I don't know why that whale would still be fresh like that-...weird!

Kessie said...

Ahh, all those sharks teeth and fossils! It was so much fun. I always wished we could do it again. Digging trilobites was great, too. I always wonder wistfully if there's any fossils out here in Arizona.

Pom Pom said...

Wow! How fun to find treasures like that!
It's pouring here. There are floods in Boulder. A chunk of ceiling fell down in the library and some kids had to empty their lockers because of water leakage. It's crazy!

Kessie said...

Just looked up fossil hunting in Arizona, and apparently there's any kind of a road cut through any kind of a mountain, there's fossils everywhere. Weird deep sea fossils, trilobites and shells and weird little critters. They did find a giant sloth out here, though.

Debbie said...

wow..I am totally impressed with all these finds and treasures. Very interesting. I have a niece who would find this fascinating. I am going to have my sister read this to her. Hope your day was good!

camp and cottage living said...

Kim
How interesting! And what treasures, especially since you all dug them out of the ground yourselves.
I believe a lot of pre-historic bones, fossils have been found in Alberta.

Alica said...

You do some of the most interesting things! The mud ball is huge...it's fun to watch it growing. I guess one thing we will never find here is sharks' teeth, that's for sure! :)

Meg said...

WOW!! That mud ball is huge!! I can't believe they've gotten it that big. What is the record they are trying to beat?

Ben tells me all the time about digging shark's teeth and how much fun it was. We'll have to take the boys to do that one of these days.

Three Sheep Studio said...

Oh my goodness...
your story just drew me in !!
As I was reading it, I thought, "this can not be real".
Amazing...what a treat for kids !! (and adults) to experience.
Rose

Kim said...

Poor Sasha. She probably thinks its crazy to have a ball that you can't play with. She likely wants you to throw it. Lol Very cool about the shark teeth. There is a huge fossil area very near by town but its against the law to take a fossil :)

myletterstoemily said...

amazing. on top of being a homeschool mom, chicken raiser, vegetable
grower, and hooker :), now you're an archaeologist, too? i'm going back
to bed.

Gumbo Lily said...

How interesting! We are always looking for fossils here too, but no shark teeth or whale vertebra.

Miss Debbie said...

Interesting treasures...esp the mud ball!! ha!ha!