How it all began…

The last few months have been very busy for us.  Our daughter got married, and we have two sons about to graduate high school.  The upcoming months are jam packed, as well - we have travel plans, as well as college preparation to do.  With all that going on, there hasn’t been a ton of time for fossil hunting or designing. Even so, I want to keep adding to the story on The Studio Chaka.

To help you get to know us, I decided to share some past fossil hunting stories with you this week.  I’ll start from the beginning 🙂…

Once we’d found fossilized shark teeth by the dozens in Florida, we were hooked on fossil hunting! My husband and I started searching for places to go in Texas to find fossils.  What we discovered was that the North Sulphur River in northern Texas holds lots and lots of fossils, including shark teeth!  We planned a trip immediately!  Here’s how that first trip went:

There are several places to access the North Sulphur River - basically any bridge crossing is a potential river entrance. There’s also Ladonia Fossil Park, but at the time we first visited, that park was not yet open. We researched online and decided on a spot that showed up as a primitive park with a boat launch area.  Oh boy, was that misleading!  The website where I found that spot had to have been at least 20 years out of date - there was no park area, just grown-up trees and grass.  No boat ramp, heck, not even a road that went to the river, because the road had long since washed out.  What we had was a small ravine to traverse where the road once was…down a steep bank & up the other side, across a patch of vine-covered, overgrown forest, then back down a steep riverbank lined with spiky trees and vines to get to the actual mostly dry riverbed.  Just getting to the river was an exhausting adventure! I should add that my husband and I are both around 50 years old, and while we are always up for adventure, we are by no means used to bushwhacking and dirt wall scaling 😂. 

The brush…The river is behind that somewhere!

On the hunt

But, once we were in the riverbed, all that climbing through brush was worth it!  Just walking along the gravel beds, we found fossilized shark teeth, various fossilized bones, fossilized worm casings, small, fossilized gastropods, pieces of baculites, petrified wood, and lots of interesting rocks.  We felt like we’d hit the fossil jackpot!  Every few steps there was something!  The only downside?  After lots of riverbed walking, we had to traverse the steep bank, overgrown brush, and the banks of the little ravine to get back to the truck.

Mosasaur vertebrae

Ammonite

Obviously, we didn’t hate the trek too much, as we’ve been back to that exact spot again!  I will say, going in the winter, as we did the second time, when the grasses and leaves were dead makes the walk far less treacherous.  We have also been able to use the new Ladonia Fossil Park entrance to the river on subsequent trips, and that was MUCH easier - there’s a parking lot with a concrete path down to the riverbed. With that ease, you do lose some of the excitement of going on an adventure, especially when you see all of the footprints of people who have already searched the area.  The North Sulphur River continues to give up the fossils, though!  Each place we’ve entered that river has given us at least something cool to take home!  I do think that this year when Lake Ralph Hall is filled with water along the North Sulphur River, the crazy brush entrance we found will be forever flooded.  I’m glad we were able to hunt fossils in that area before it is permanently underwater.  We’ll just have to find other places to enter and search.  Let the adventure continue!