On my first day of digging, I wasn’t really able to find anything and I was mainly leveling off the square I was assigned in. The guy next to me somehow managed to find everything in his square. Every half-hour, he found something. He had lots of interesting stories to tell as he had come from New York in car and had stopped at several different digging sites along the way.
![fossil in a plastic specimen bag](https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/81/2022/04/2022-04-VP-Lourdes-Ubeira-montbrook-Picture1.jpg)
On my second day, the discovery I was most excited for was the pygal (top-left picture). It is the bottom a turtle’s carapace (or shell). On my third day, I was able to uncover a good majority of a big fossil, but I was unable to tell what it was. Uncovering it was super fun and I went through the whole day without being able to uncover it completely, which means it’s a pretty big fossil. On my fourth and final day of digging, I made my most exciting discovery yet which was a shoulder. I was excited about this one because it was the first fossil I was able to recognize when I dug it out. I had accidentally mistaken the pygal for a tooth, beforehand.
I also worked at the museum. I worked on the weekend, so there were a lot of kiddos there to ask questions. I was mainly working at the front, preparing a jacket. What this means is that there is a fossil inside a jacket and there is also lots of dirt inside. I had to work on uncovering the dirt inside the jacket in order to find the fossil. Mine was a turtle jacket, which means at the bottom of it was a turtle fossil. I had a lot of fun digging it up and was able to find some mini-fossils scattered within. Answering the questions kids and adults asked were super fun, as well, and was probably my favorite part of the whole experience.
![three images of a hand holding a fossil](https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/81/2022/04/2022-04-VP-Lourdes-Ubeira-montbrook-Picture4.png)