Fossil Hunting

            As the boys are both little adventurers, we are often finding fun things to do.  Nani and Chris both love to explore as well and with acres upon acres of some of the most beautiful and interesting places, we are always able to take full advantage of it.  Recently we decided to take a short drive down the dried up lakeshore to a spot known for its fossils.  As no trip is ever a small mission, we quickly ended up with a truck full of village kids who wanted to join.  I’d never been fossil hunting before and it proved to be a really neat experience.  Essentially what you do is, as Nanai explained it, “walk around with your head down until you see something black that doesn’t look like a stone.”  Simple as that.  Well it took a bit of eye-training but I was able to find a bunch of pieces of bone.  Although I thought my finds were pretty neat everyone else easily trumped me by discovering Crocodile teeth, hyena teeth, and various larger bones.  Nani found a really cool molar (not sure what animal it’s from but teeth fossils look really neat because they’re extremely shiny) and gave it to me.  Although Chris insists that the kids throw back all of the bones and only keep the teeth, I decided to keep one neat fossil of a piece of bone I found.  Apparently the area we were is the same place where they somewhat recently discovered one of the oldest hominids.  Because of this, there are constantly archeologists around and if anyone finds a bone that could possibly be human it’s required to mark the location and report it. The boys laughed when I told them this is only something an American kid would get to do on a fieldtrip, but then it would just be to a museum where fake fossils were buried just five minutes before in something that too closely resembled a giant sandbox. 

            After our excavating adventure (more like after our necks and backs became too sore from looking down and bending over) we drove a bit more to one of the springs where the boys and their friends all went fishing and running around while the “adults” relaxed with a few drinks and snacks to watch a beautiful sunset over the mountains.