When you are a scientist, of course, you have to go to the site being studied,  get familiar with it, and collect samples. That’s what we did yesterday, on this warm, sunny day. Our group and students will be studying distribution of fossil shark teeth at the Aurora Phosphate mine area, therefore , that’s where Bucky, Kerrie, Kimberly, and I were headed yesterday; approximately two hours from Raleigh. And we will visit this place with our students later, when we start our case study.

The Phosphate mine is not open to the public, so we just drove around it, trying to see beyond shrubs and bushes, locating where the drag lines were that shovel out sediment  to extract the phosphate and other chemical substances to later produce phosphoric acid and other products for fertilizers. But us, we are more interested in the sediments that are left from that mining, which is where we will be looking for the shark teeth. Finally, we found a spot where we could get better view of it, and with great excitement of finding that spot, we took pictures.

We could see the huge drag lines at work on the back; they work 24 hours a day.

After that “exciting moment” (that’s the best shot we could get of the mining), we got back into the car and drove to the Aurora Fossil Museum, another interesting place to visit. This museum gets the leftovers of sediment from the dragging out, so we were able to dig in and start   finding shark teeth of all kinds. I found around 32 different ones. This is also the place from where we are getting the sediment for our classes to use. Each of us, teachers, got a bucket full of sediment to take to our school.

It was an interesting and fun experience. My students are becoming scientists, too, so they will be doing this same trip when starting our case study. I hope they enjoy it, and learn from it as much as I did, or even more.