Anyone else into fossil hunting at all? Trying to find bison bones and such?
East Central MN doesn't have much for fossils. Most of it was covered in ice, then water in the form of large glacial lakes. The geology of the area isn't very conducive for fossil creation, and even if it was the area didn't have the pre-historic massive game migrations to create lots of opportunities for stuff to become fossilized. Out in the Dakotas, or even Iowa outside the area of the Des Moines lobe, finding fossils are extremely easy. All you have to do is look. There are places where I could take anyone who's never done it and we'd come back with a couple giant bison skulls. All the stuff in the ice age was Huge. Moose, beaver, cougars [cats], mastodons obviously, and bison.....the bison we have today had ancestors back then that were three times the size. When there's tens of millions of them migrating in massive herds.....whenever they crossed a river? A whole bunch of old, weak, young, and sick got stuck in the mud on the bank and then trampled by the remainder of the herd behind them. There were 65-80 million bison pre-settlement and their decimation lead to the last of the great Buffalo hunts taking place in SW ND by Hettinger during the late 1880's.
That's 65-80 million at one time....one day in history not much more than a couple hundred years ago on that day there were that many alive and roaming the prairie....now think of that many bison living thousands of years and dying....how many generations came and went.....we're talking Billions of head of bison cumulatively.
So they are exceedingly common in places like the Dakotas once you get on the rivers, which are largely the same ones today that the bison had to cross back then. There's more water from damming a lot of it but that actually helps finding fossils. That water digs away at hillsides they died on and then were covered with layers of sediment over millenia.
Anyways, I never find shit in this part of MN so I was pretty thrilled to find some stuff today being that any and every flowing waterway is low as hell and exposing layers of sediment that haven't had their time meet present day since....well, 33 years was the last time.
Pretty cool imo.....