: Silver

The Giant turtle shown in the picture Chiara is going to put up for me took two years to excavate. It weighed in at 7 tons and my students and I simply couldn't move it. I then enlisted the services of a submarine crew, WESTVACO Corporation, and elements of the army corps of engineers. Even with 3 backhoes, a bulldozer, and picks and shovels, it took us a weekend to get it out of the ground working in 24 hour shifts. Everybody got involved. All the radio stations reported our progress at half hour intervals, local fastfood joints supplied us with lots of goodies, and there were TV cameras all over the place. We had about 500 people watching us.

I think the new find may be a part of the original. We got the shell before, but not all the vertebra, ribs, skull, and parts of the limbs. When I finished exploratory work today, I'd uncovered a 12 foot long fossil exposure and possibly a part of the skull. Working on fossils in a creek with all these little waterfalls and in jungle like surroundings brings together reality and fantasy. The crew from the Lost World wouldn't have been out of place there at all.

The only other fossil that it took years to excavate was that of a giant sloth several times the size of an elephant. I still have one of it's teeth on my desk.

A really neat find was one my wife, Sande, made before her accident. It was a complete mint condition primitive whale skull that looked for all the world like that of a dragon. If board members would like to see some of this stuff and Chiara wouldn't mind posting it, I'd sent along a few more pictures.

Steve Faust