(WBLT) -- The water level on the Mississippi River has been unusually low this year due to the drought in the nation's heart land.
While the low water is a problem for the shipping industry, there is at least one group who loves it when the river is down.
Fossil hunters.
People are out combing the normally water covered bottom that has been exposed, for a rarity, fossils.
John Moore, known better by his nickname of Puddin', has been searching the river for decades and has piles of bones in his shop on south walnut street in Greenville.
George Phillips, Paleontology Curator with the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, says most of the fossil bones found in the Mississippi river are from the late ice age.
It has been a great fossil hunting season for the hunters.
"This year more than the other years because of the low water," said Phillips. "You look for the gravel bars. That's where you find most of it, in the gravel bars. Very seldom you find anything in the sand."
