Mark Renz - Florida Time Forgot Photography April

Click image for "Heron on the Rise" series

April 2012

Hola friends and friendly strangers!

Welcome to another issue of Florida Time Forgot, an extension of Fossil Expeditions and an on-going collection of my quirky photo stories and Marisa's great art and funky illustrations.

If you click on the heron image above or several other photos, you'll see that love is in the air, or should I say love birds. Biologist Tom Poulson was kind enough to invite me to his favorite birding nursery where we observed close to 200 nests of various wading birds. We were careful to shoot from a distance without spooking moms or chicks.

Our sweet blue heeler Darwin (alias Sir Chuck), is always on the look-out for a new friend, which he found in an Alva graveyard. To his chagrin, the friend turned out to be a statue of a...well, I'll let you check it out below.

I am both repelled by and drawn to spiders, especially jumping spiders that resemble silverback gorillas with muscular-looking legs. These powerful little hoppers actually pursue other spiders much larger than themselves, as evidenced in one of my previous newsletters. And in this issue, the prey is a fellow hopper of a different phyla.

"Florida Weekly" reporter Evan Williams joined my group on a fossil expedition to the Peace River recently. Evan's piece not only focused on the ancient marine mammals, reptiles and sharks of the Peace River, but on the Florida Museum of Natural History's efforts to learn more about prehistoric Florida from this outstanding Florida waterway.

Some of you may remember that Dr. Gordon Hubbell legally landed a 19-1/2' great white shark in the deserts of Peru 20 some odd years ago. Of course the big shark was fossilized. I posted my interview with Dr. Hubbell on Youtube.

Also featured is the 10 million year-old dugong I stumbled onto in an abandoned phosphate mine back in the 90s. I turned the critter over to the Florida Museum of Natural History, which graciously loaned the beast to the Clewiston Museum as a permanent loan. The skull was complete, although crushed.

For those of you who fret over whether you should keep your best fossil finds or donate them to a museum, perhaps my essay called, "Why donate?" will help you make up your mind.

And finally, we want to thank all of you, including those of you who did not know my sister Cheryl, but who still wished her well in her attempt to overcome a rare form of ovarian cancer. She died a few weeks ago and leaves behind a saint of a husband named Tommy. We will all miss her dearly.

We hope you enjoy your visit.

Bestus,

Mark and Marisa Renz