There Were Mastodons Under My Feet!

Red cream soda and chocolate ice cream AND fossils on the same day?!? This turned out to be a top-tier holiday!

Mastodon State Historic Site preserves the Kimmswick Bone Bed, an incompletely excavated paleontological site that contains both mastodon fossils and Clovis points, giving evidence that early humans hunted them here:

There was apparently a long history (starting in at least the 1800s!) of unscientific fossil digging at this site, and the lack of preservation was further exacerbated by the full lifespan of a rock quarry. If I understood the signage correctly, everything below the level of the bluff was excavated by the quarry--

--and if that is indeed true, then it makes me physically sick to think about, because what other countless wonders must have been hauled out and crushed into gravel without anyone noticing?

In the 1970s, the entire remaining site was almost hauled out and crushed into gravel without anyone noticing, when a state highway was being planned for that exact spot. Fortunately, a public campaign saved it and helped the Missouri Department of Natural Resources buy it, but you can see from this Google Earth screenshot how close it is to the bone bed:

The bottom right of the loop trail is an extension that goes through the former dig sites for the bone bed. It's SO close to two access roads and the highway! To the south, just off-screen, is Rock Creek, which is actually where the earliest mastodon bones were reported, having been seen weathering out of the bank. The scientist who excavated and prepared them turned them into a sideshow Voltron-esque super mastodon that he exhibited around the world and later sold to the British Natural History Museum... where it was disassembled and reassembled into a proper mastodon skeleton, lol.

The Mastodon State Historic Site Museum had so many mastodon fossils excavated from Kimmswick and the neighboring Barnhart site!

This tusk is a product of rescue paleontology conducted by volunteers on the site of a car dealership that was trying to expand. Here's a former volunteer's interesting take on that excavation:

I found a travel blogger's post about visiting this museum before the tusk was conserved, so you can see how it was previously mounted and its darker appearance.

Ugh, if I was trying to build ANYTHING, I do not care what, and I uncovered a fossil, I would stop what I was doing forever and instead spend the rest of my life grubbing in the dirt with all my brand-new fossils!

So many of my favorite things all in the same frame:

I feel like often, state park sites lose out on the best artifacts, so that the visitor centers for even the most amazing state sites are somewhat sparse. Not this place, though! Check out some of their very many Clovis points!

And then much later, we get to my favorite native peoples--the Mississippians!

This site is actually just a few miles and across the river from Cahokia, which makes me wonder what Mississippian settlements might have been right here, out in the Cahokian suburbs.

On top of the bluff, above the quarry site, there is apparently also a cool cave:

With even more cool stuff found inside it!

It doesn't seem like any of these sites have been excavated since the 1980s, which in some ways is a huge bummer because who wouldn't want more mastodon bones and Clovis points in the world? But I guess if nobody has a research question that can only be solved by excavating here, then it all might as well stay tucked safely away in its soil and caves!

Okay, one more picture of the tusk before we hike!

This shelter on the hiking trail is the historical marker for the Kimmswick Bone Bed--

--but the actual excavation sites are unmarked and fully grown over. Here's where they're supposed to be:

The hiking trail basically follows the edge of the Possible Distribution of Clovis Age Sediments from the northeast down and then west to about the near edge of the Concrete Foundation of Lime Kiln. So hiking back, basically everything to the right of the trail is assorted old dig sites, and everything to the left of the trail is potential Clovis evidence.

Sounds interesting, but it actually all looks like this, lol:

But hey, that just means that mastodons and Clovis points could be ANYWHERE. They were probably right there under our feet sometimes!

Here's me with definitely a mastodon skeleton with a Clovis point sticking into it right there under my feet:

Afterward, we did everyone's least favorite thing to do when they're hot and sweaty and grubby and tired--we got back in the car and drove for another five hours, sigh.

But at least we had plenty of Southern Missouri/Northern Arkansas wildlife to entertain us:

Only one of the several alarming bumper stickers is legible in this photo, but I assure you that they were all nasty.

Next up: an old fort and a new musical!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

And on Day 14, We Went Home

No more fish and chips and Cornish pasties and full English breakfasts--somehow we managed to eat McDonald's three meals in a row on the way home.

The McDonald's UK menu is slightly novel, at least...

Anyway, during our trip home most of my brain power was focused not on nutrition, but on this:

Tangent: the Gatwick Airport Facebook page is weirdly really entertaining? They mow the lawns around the runways with sheep!

I have the WORST time with airport security! They always hassle me, it's so ridiculous, but this time I didn't even care if they hassled ME--I just wanted my precious fossils and rocks and bits of sea glass and chunks of chalk to make it safely home with me!

I was a little nervous about this clause, because ALL of my rocks and fossils and chalky bits were exceedingly dirty... as were the clothes I'd been digging them up with:

But nevertheless, I fitted all my rocks and fossils and chalky bits into my carry-on luggage, padded with filthy T-shirts and joggers, and hoped for the best.

And then was immediately stopped by airport security and held for nearly 30 minutes while the Gatwick agent picked up every. Individual. Rock. I thought she was being a bit overdramatic in her examination of most of them--I mean, does nobody at all ever fly home with fossils? The Jurassic Coast is RIGHT THERE!!!--but even I admit that the rock that she actually took into the back to consult with the other security people about, the one approximately the size of three stacked paperback novels and with a tantalizing fossil just peeking out of it, might have been overkill on my part. When she struggled to heft it with one hand, I could sort of see her point about its appropriateness on an airplane where you can't even take thread scissors. I was prepared to give it up without a fuss, but the people in the back room eventually decided that even though it was big and heavy enough to brain someone with, I guess it wasn't technically forbidden, and so off it went with me to New York!

Where I was held up by security for nearly an hour, this time, for the exact same examination of all my rocks and fossils. The bad news is that there was only one inspector, and she took her sweet time on each of the massive pile of bags lined up for her to inspect, while all of us travelers shifted from foot to foot and checked our phones anxiously in hopes that our connecting flights had been delayed. The good news is that since we were all just standing there, we all got to see everyone's contraband. When the inspector unzipped one old guy's suitcase and revealed a giant water bottle FULL of water inside, I gasped out loud! Water is FORBIDDEN to cross the security line! 

In an airport, one finds one's entertainment where one can. Case in point: the family in the row ahead of us on our London to New York flight played Encanto on the seatback TV for their toddler FOR THE ENTIRE FLIGHT. Whenever the movie's ending would draw near, one parent would rewind it to the beginning and the toddler would go back to bopping along to "The Family Madrigal." It was awesome.

Finally, though, we only had one last leg of our flight left to fly--

--then just one last hour of driving left to drive, during which it turned out that it was equally terrifying to drive on the right side of the road after you'd been driving on the left all week, and back home we were, safe and sound.

A certain ginger gentleman was VERY happy to see us!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

Day 13 in England: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning

 

Low tide waits for no one, and so three of us were up at the crack of dawn this morning to drive over to Lyme Regis and spend a couple more hours in the footsteps of Mary Anning.

Here's our complete itinerary for the day:

• fossil hunting in Lyme Regis
• back to Beer for breakfast and picking up the sleepyhead
• back to Lyme Regis again for sightseeing
• drive back to Gatwick Airport, stopping at a convenient local chain store along the way for souvenirs
• drop off the rental car, check into our airport hotel, and try to fit a hundred pounds of rocks and fossils into four carry-ons and four personal items!

Who knows how on earth we would have gotten all our rocks and fossils home if we'd been as successful at fossil hunting as I am in my dreams!

We parked by Monmouth Beach, then hustled west, where we puttered on the shore, fossil hunting and admiring the Ammonite Pavement:

We found a few pretty treasures of our own!

The best part, though, was imagining myself in the footsteps of Mary Anning. This stretch of coast was her backyard, and although she ranged widely both east and west, this was her home ground:

I'm sure I'm grubbing in the wet sand just like she did, only she was wearing massive wool skirts and I'm wearing a filthy pair of joggers:

Eventually, we had to make the long walk down the beach back to our car (funny how the walk is always SO much longer on the way back!) so we could go back to Beer and fetch our teenager before checkout.

I did wash my hands before I sat down for my last full English breakfast of the trip, but I didn't change out of my muddy clothes. Gotta stay true to myself no matter where I am!

In our early morning trip to Lyme Regis, we'd encountered little traffic and just a couple of dog walkers and joggers. By mid-morning, however, Bank Holiday Monday/Mid-Term Break was in full swing omg! Matt was a tentative but extremely careful driver during this whole week, and it was funny/terrifying to encounter so many absolutely terrible drivers on these, the narrowest roads outside of Dartmoor--honestly, I think some were even narrower than in Dartmoor! We missed by centimeters being collided into by a car that turned into us around a blind corner, and half the cars we saw (including ours, ahem) spent half the time driving half onto the sidewalk. And that was even with us parking in a pay lot at the edge of town--the traffic we saw in the middle of town was absolutely bonkers!

British friends, WHAT ON EARTH.

Nevertheless, I made it to my ultimate destination, the pinnacle of this trip: 

I was so lucky, because this museum is closed on Mondays. The only exception?

School breaks!

So me and all the rowdy school kids and all their parents happily crowded inside on this Half-Term Monday, and I could achieve my dream of worshipping at the feet of Mary Anning, on the spot where she once lived and worked and kept her fossils.

The Lyme Regis Museum is built on the site of Mary Anning's former house, which was torn down in 1889. The only known depiction of what her house looked like is this drawing--

--which the museum turned into this model:

I love those picture windows. I imagine them all full of fossils!

The museum has a wonderful mix of exhibits. It has fossils collected (or likely collected) by Mary Anning--

I have explained to Matt numerous times that I am in desperate need of a giant LEGO ichthyosaur of my own, and yet what did I get for my birthday? Well, actually I got an absolutely awesome DIY model kit of Stonehenge and I'm thrilled with it... but I also still really want a giant LEGO ichthyosaur!

This fossil is a shark skull, the first of its kind and used as the holotype of the species. Mary Anning discovered it, collected it, and prepared it... so obviously it's named Hybodus bechei after Henry De la Beche.

This complete ichthyosaur fossil is on loan here while the Lyme Regis Museum crowdfunds the money to purchase it.

--items from the period in which she lived--

Look at all those pipes! I mudlarked so many of their stems on the Thames!

--and tons of other fossils collected in this area and donated by local fossil hunters. 

The gift shop was great, too. Here's me having an emotional reaction to JURASSIC CREATURE STUFFIES!!!

I'm supposed to stop buying "family stuffies" so I did not bring any home, but I intend to revisit this ridiculous rule soon. The only stuffies that I so far own and insist on exhibiting in the family space are 1) an Edmontosaurus annectens, 2) a whale shark, 3) the exact same mermaid sequin dinosaur that the SpaceX Crew Dragon took into orbit as their "gravity indicator," and 4) Captain Ameribear, a Build a Bear that I liberated from a friend as we were setting up for a group garage sale. That is NOT too many family stuffies, you guys!

One of the exhibit labels in the Lyme Regis Museum mentioned that Mary Anning was buried at St. Michael's Church, "just a few hundred meters from the museum." So guess what I Googled next?

That's two of my most favorite heroines who have died of breast cancer, if you're keeping count.

St. Michael's Church, like Mary Anning's former house, has its back to the sea, and below the church there's actually a paved path that follows the coast and passes over the spot where she made one of her best discoveries. 

If you walk down the path to the end, you'll find Mary, herself, ammonite in hand, Tray at her feet, walking with purpose towards eternity:

Yes, I made Matt take a photo of me walking arm in arm with her, chatting like the best friends we are. I have a very vivid and active internal life!

My meeting with Mary was the culmination and final wish on my list for this trip, so we meandered slowly back to our car up the narrow streets of Lyme Regis, browsing in every rocks and fossil shop we saw along the way. We braved the last of the narrow roads, and Matt handled the A303 like a man who'd been driving here his whole life and knew every single rule for roundabouts:

On the outskirts of London, I found a shopping area that said it had a Sainsbury's, so we detoured over for Cadbury and crisps to take back home, and we had a lovely surprise! The teenager had discovered, too late in the London leg of our trip, a discount bookstore chain that she wanted to visit. This was our second to last day in the city, though, and there was not a location anywhere near us--but, alas, the day before, when we'd taken that long bus trip out to Pax Lodge, we'd seen one from the bus window but didn't know what it was! ARGH!

I felt terrible about it, because it was, like, literally one of two entire things the kid expressed genuine interest in during the entire trip, so omg I was beyond ecstatic when it turned out that this shopping area had The Works bookstore! 

Bonus: it also had a Sainsbury's AND a Poundland! All our cheap souvenirs in one convenient trip!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!