I am very excited that the 11th annual Family Fossil Hunt is again scheduled this year at the Wright Brothers’ Gravel Pit and Quarry. This is a tremendous opportunity for students, parents and geologists to find bones of a diverse number of extinct Pleistocene mammals in our own county. The species diversity of fauna compares to the La Brea Tar Pit in Los Angeles—the same animals they find there, we find here and all are referred to as the La Brea Fauna.

So come out on May 19th and see what everyone finds at the pit—see why I am so excited about my Phase II— Safari in South Texas. One of these bones, a drawing of the skeleton of the animal, an artist’s rendition of the animal and a paleographic map of the Nueces River 11,000 years ago need to be in the Trophy cases of each school in the Coastal Bend. Come out and be a part of a Safari in South Texas. Dr Jon Baskin and Mr Ronnie Thomas of TAMU-Kingsville will be on hand to identify the discoveries.

Susan and I were in Las Vegas the weekend before the AAPG convention in Long Beach and we asked a cab driver to take us to the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas—it is not a usual tourist destination. It was spectacular—I would like to have something like this in Corpus Christi. The picture above is of a cast of a Mammoth along with a mural of the Las Vegas area during the Ice Age. These same animals lived in Corpus Christi. It was exciting to walk under the creature and really experience its size because when you tell a student that these animals were 16 feet tall, it is hard to imagine how big they are. This is a cast, but I saw a complete authentic skeleton for sale at the Tuscon Gem and Mineral Show for $300,000 delivered and setup.

I retired from active oil and gas management at Suemaur Exploration—but find out what I have learned about retirement in my continuing saga of the oil business in Lessons Learned.

Owen Hopkins
President Corpus Christi Geological Society