Diane: We woke up to a layer of dew on all of our things. Roberto didn't care for it and said he had never seen so much moisture in the desert. The sun only took a few minutes to dry our gear, and we were off. The first stop today was a beautifully preserved whale's mouth.
Now that's what I'm here for.
The megalodon shark was the most notorious of its kind. Their huge teeth are reported to have been as large as 8 inches in height. Now that's what Tom's here for. The teeth are very similar to those of the current day great white shark. The body of the megalodon, however, was much larger - estimated to reach up to 50 feet long, about three times the size of the great white. They also disappeared off the face of the earth about 2 million years ago. We drove deep into the desert today hunting the megalodon's long lost teeth.
I found a few small Mako shark teeth today, but I wasn't drawn to them. I could easily have left them where I found them. Tom, on the other hand, found a large megalodon shark's tooth at the end of the day. Roberto felt strongly that Tom was meant to find this tooth. There were no other teeth in the area and Roberto had chosen a different area to walk, missing the tooth entirely. Roberto has the well-honed ability to spot shark's teeth from many feet away, while driving in his truck. So, he doesn't generally "miss" a tooth. In any event, Tom was absolutely ecstatic and I think he could have gone on all night looking for more teeth.
Instead we set up camp, which was only slightly more complicated today. It was quite hot and I had had quite enough of fossil hunting and dust in my face, so the first thing out of the truck was the canopy. This was followed by the lawn chairs, which were set up in the shade of the canopy. Now that camp was set, I took a look around and saw clearly that we were just a few specks in the face of all this desert (look closely to see our truck and canopy).
Having washed my face, downed some juice, and found a nice spot in the shade, I curled up with my book and a jar of peanut butter. After a bit, I set my book down and speculated on the history of this place. Long ago, I could imagine that high above me would be the ocean's surface. Although our traveling elevation is somewhere in the vicinity of 400 meters above sea level, this used to be the ocean floor. Due to tectonic plates bumping up against each other about 12 million years ago, the land here has been shoved up and bent at odd angles.
Tom, TM, and Roberto were still out walking these odd angles hoping for more great desert treasure. My thoughts took a jagged turn. Imagine this was gold we were all after and there was a multitude out here with us, all desperately searching for the same thing. Those same strong urges that have propelled Tom and TM to continue their search in the mid-afternoon sun would have resulted in a lot of unmarked graves. Here in Peru, it would have attracted the attention of the Spanish Conquistadors, who killed and exploited the people already here. I went back to my book.
Once the sun neared the horizon, I decided to explore the area. It was extraordinarily windy and I was thankful that Roberto knew the ins and outs of finding a camping spot pretty much out of the wind. I spotted a plant. A cluster of plants really. They seemed to grow similar to spider plants and they were covered in a thick layer of dust.
We had a twinkling night sky totally filled with stars. The kids looked for shooting stars. The desert at night puts me in a reverie.
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