Day 9 - Asa Forman

The POHS Paleontology A-Term waved “goodbye” to the Ranger Creek Ranch this morning, as we prepared to pack into an already crowded van for six hours.

Before getting on the road, we made two detours. We stopped, first, at a wind turbine, and were each blown away by its sheer size and power. Secondly, we stopped at the cemetery, and were tasked with finding the grave of Ina Roddy Harrison, Mr. Roddy’s great aunt. After a forty-five minute scavenger hunt through several gravesites, I found the overturned gravestone of the one-hundred-and-six-year-old woman, and was rewarded with a drink of my choice. We were very fortunate to have the opportunity to visit these gravesites; apparently, people are dying to get into them. Following the two short detours, we were on the road again; in fact, we all just could not wait to get on the road again.

While we were on the road, we listened to a selection of the greatest albums ever produced, including The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, and the Wings’ Band on the Run, among many others. Additionally, Mr. Roddy gave us a key lesson on how the top three albums listed on the Rolling Stones’ 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list came to be. We learned that the albums—Revolver (The Beatles, 1966), Pet Sounds (The Beach Boys, 1966), and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles, 1967)—were made in an attempt to 1-up the other until Bryan Wilson, the mastermind behind The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, decided that no album could trump that of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

We stopped last in Fort Worth. We zipped in-and-out of In-N-Out Burger, ensuring that we would have enough time to examine the housing development—I mean Ammonite bed—several minutes from the restaurant. We found several pieces of the extinct marine mollusk, but not one in its entirety. After a thirty-minute search of the bed, we hopped back in the van, and drove back to Houston. During our drive, Catherine and I played, I kid you not, seventy-five games of Gin Rummy to conclude the trip.

Albeit I arrived in the field a day late because of severe GI problems, I thoroughly enjoyed excavating the fossils of our ancestors in the red dirt of the Craddock bone beds.