What is the coolest thing you have found?

[mix]

And by "found" I mean something that was just sitting there to be had, not bought.

Me? Is has to be 70-80 million year old marine fossils on some family land in the mountains here in NM.

[Moondog]

1. The beach of Venice, FL (just south of Sarasota), after off-shore winter storms

frequently has a number of fossilized shark's teeth, from long extinct species, wash ashore. Picked up quite a variety of them one day several years ago.

[bigwillq]

2. This rock that looked like an alien head

Found it at the beach. Still have it.

[Jade Fox]

30. Hey, I've got a rock that looks like an alien head too!!

Wish I could scan photos. :(

I've got a lot of cool rocks. Been collecting them for decades.

[Kali]

3. cash

I never find much of anything good. Husband found a metate and a turquoise bead that I wear on an earring. They were just below the house about 1/4 of a mile. There is a pit house (and likely several more) near there.

I find things like dead animals and abandoned vehicles :rofl:

[mix]

28. pit houses?

that's interesting...i just visited some here in Pecos and up in Mesa Verde last month...any pottery sherds or stone tools?

[Kali]

32. oh yeah - even I can find sherds!

:P You know, I think humans have been litterbugs since the beginning - it's just the old trash and graffiti that are cool.:rofl:

There is a big pile of metates and manos here at the house that people over the generations have collected. No notes, dates, locations - kind of a shame but they didn't know any better in those days. Of course the one we found doesn't have any notes either, but I'm immortal and I will always remember, right?:crazy: As far as arrowheads or spear points - I haven't ever found any and there aren't any in the inherited pile of "stuff" like that.

Used to go up Pecos way with the family when I was a kid. (got anthro/archys in the "tree" as it were)

[demmiblue]

4. Part of a trilobite, Petoskey stones, as well as other assorted fossilized coral.

[marzipanni]

5. I found some round lava 'marbles' bobbing around at the surf line

I think they bubbled up from an under sea volcanic fissure and eventually washed up on the beach. It was so long ago now I can't remember if I found them in Hawaii or California, but I still have them. They are reddish brown (oxidized) on the outside and gray inside, about 3/4" in diameter.

[JitterbugPerfume]

6. I found a stone ax head once

but someone stole it, along with some other neat stuff I didn't have nailed down.

[mix]

14. bummer

someone was telling me recently how effective those stone axes were in cutting wood

[Orrex]

7. I found a voice-equipped travel clock about 25 years ago

on the Appalachian Trail, of all places.

It was about the size of an average 110 camera, with a simple LCD display showing the time, but if you pressed a little white button on top, it announced the time in a buzzing "Wizard of Wor" voice. It also had an alarm feature, so you could be awakened by that freaky metal voice, if that's your idea of a pleasant good morning.


I also found a small medallion from the 1939 World's Fair while digging a garden for my mother about five years later. In today's money, it's probably worth about three whole dollars!!1!

[Lil Missy]

8. A sex stone!

Well, it was a fuckin' rock.

[Digit]

9. Civil War breast plate

Bullets, Pennsylvania button, eagle buttons, flat buttons, buckles, Civil War era coins and a bunch more stuff.
A good metal detector helped ;)

[tigereye]

33. I'm guessing that was near some CIvil War battle site?

[Digit]

35. No, not even close to a battlefield

A townhouse community was being constructed in Falls Church, Va and the bulldozers had removed the top layer of soil.
Most of my relics have come from construction sites.

[Robb]

10. The website is in my profile.

;)

[arcadian]

11. Marine fossil for me too.

An intact bone of a whale that lived during the Miocene. I think it would be a phalange, it corresponds to a finger bone in a human, it's intact and has smooth edges. I saw some just like it in the Smithsonian.

[baldguy]

12. A 1770-something English half-penny

Like this, only more corroded

[madinmaryland]

13. ...

My penis.

:hide:

[hunter]

15. $50 my grandmother stuck in a dictionary before she died.

And the timing was perfect -- my wife and I were out of money, out of food, and payday was still a week away.

We'd never opened that dictionary before -- it was huge -- but for some reason I'd misplaced my little paperback dictionary.

Maybe my grandmother was insane because she could see the future... Or maybe insane grandmothers simply hide money.

But that's probably the coolest thing I've ever found.

[mix]

18. great story, thanks

:hi:

[Cannikin]

16. A nice quartz crystal similar to this one:

[intheflow]

17. A high-end portable home traction unit.

My neighbors put this beautiful case out by the curb on trash day. Thinking it was a nice suitcase, I went to check it out. Inside the case was a home traction unit which looked like it had never been used. (The instructional video was still in its plastic wrap!) I brought it in and tried to donate it to a local vet center, but they wouldn't take it. Then, coincidently, my new roommate was a vet and he needs traction. This was a huge upgrade from the home system he had before. That was absolutely the coolest thing I've ever found.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

19. fossilized shark's teeth

[mix]

22. megalodon? the big tooth?

very cool

[Tuesday Afternoon]

23. I snagged that pic off the net but, mine is the same size...

so maybe it is a megladon. I got them in the Santee-Cooper River ...scuba diving many years ago.

[ornotna]

20. $1500 cash

Stuffed behind the glove box of a used car I purchased. Found it a couple of years after owning the car.

[mix]

24. incredible!

:toast:

[buzzard]

21. When we put our pool in we had to connect to the sewers as opposed to septic which is what we had

been on, while digging the trench for the sewer connection we found horse bones including the horseshoes, I have kept them all these years and I am not sure why.

[mix]

27. what was there, before the houses and pool? n/t

[Wapsie B]

25. I'll take sanity for 500 Alex!

[mix]

26. still looking here n/t

[realisticphish]

29. Not that cool, i guess

but I found a Bicentennial mason jar that someone had sent in to test their lead levels at the water lab where I worked

Nothing amazing, but kind of a weird thing to send a water sample in :shrug:

[LostInAnomie]

31. A 1919 bus token, a $100 bill, an old bottle shaped like an Indian...

... an ounce of pot, a couple of wheelchairs, an old flask, and a tin penny.

[guitar man]

34. Arrow heads

Spear points and stone knife blades. They can be found in creek and river beds and other places all over Oklahoma,

[pinniped]

36. I'll follow your lead and say trilobites.

I plucked some out of the ground somewhere in eastern NV.

[Ikonoklast]

37. Assorted brachiopod fossils.

Where I lived as a kid, nearby there were these large erosion cracks in the ground, on a gentle slope at the edge of a large, open field. They were eight to ten feet deep, and ran for sixty-eighty feet or so. The fossil hunting there was a kid's dream, I used to have hundreds of them.

[semillama]

38. I have an unfair advantage

I'm an archaeologist, so my job is to find cool things.

[mix]

41. what type? n/t

[semillama]

44. I specialize in nineteenth century historical and industrial sites

but do general surveys that involve locating prehistoric sites as well.

[KG]

39. myself.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

40. A stack of old magazines

with "current" articles about the Bohr war.

Made for some interesting reading.

I just left them where I found them.

[driver8]

42. I found a letter signed by Cecil B. DeMille in the trash.

I work at Warner Bros. studios and we have a vault where we keep tapes. I was down there one night looking for something and saw this box of trash that was to be thrown out. For some reason, I felt that I needed to take a look at what was in the box and was glad I did!!

It turns out the box was filled with files from the former head of publicity for the studio. It was filled with letters and cards from many, many celebrities and stars from the past including Joan Crawford, Ed Sullivan, Cecil B. DeMille, Jack Warner, etc.

I turned everything over to our museum and they could not believe that this stuff almost got thrown out!!

[Arkansas Granny]

43. I found an old, hand-hewn wagon wheel hub half buried in mud at an old

abandoned homesite where an old barn had once stood. It still had the metal bands and spindles. I use it as an unusual plant stand.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

45. A letter personally signed by Bill Clinton to my grandfather.

The day of my grandfather's funeral, after we had gotten back from the cemetary, we were looking through his house and some of his belongings. And I came across a letter with the 1992 Clinton/Gore campaign logo, addressed to my grandfather. Apparently, my grandfather--a skilled carpenter--had crafted a desktop organizer and sent it to the Clinton campaign. The letter goes on to thank him for the gift. At the bottom was Bill Clinton's name with a signature in black marker above it.

At first I thought the signature was a robo-signature or a stamp. However, after looking at the back of the letter, I saw that the black marker had bleed through, meaning that somebody had actually signed it. Either it was a staffer knowledgable at forging Clinton's signature, or Bill Clinton himself had signed it. I like to think it is Clinton's own personal signature, as by all accounts it looks like Clinton's official signature. I thought it was a neat memento, especially on the day I found it, and I now have the letter framed in my office.

[mix]

48. very cool

what a wonderful way to remember your grandfather...thanks

[Tommy_Carcetti]

46. The second coolest thing I had ever found was a baseball glove after a car ran into our front yard.

Here's the story to that:

My home growing up was located on a rather dangerous curve on the road. The posted speed limit was 35, but you'd have all sorts of people going at least 60 and zipping around the curve like there's no tomorrow.

In the middle of one night, someone goes speeding around the bend, can't control the curve by our house, and their car lands in the front yard. Thankfully it didn't hit the house, but it did knock down a few bushes. The car has some moderate damage but is upright and apparently drivable. My parents go outside, check to see what went on, and the driver is still in the car. He apologizes, says he was forced off the road by another car, but that he is okay and that there is no need for police to come to the scene. My parents are somewhat skeptical although it didn't seem like the driver had been drinking. So the driver is able to drive off.

The next day, in the daylight, we go outside to survey the scene for the damage to the shrubbery. And in the spot where the car ended up in our yard there is a baseball glove just sitting there. Apparently the breaking must have been so hard that it flew the baseball glove out of the window and it had landed there.

Being a baseball fan and playing little league at the time, I decided to keep the glove. My parents agreed; they figured it was a fair exchange for the damaged bushes.

[frogmarch]

47. a petrified clump of crushed ammonoids

that my paleontologist friends identified as Hesperornis regurgitate.