Geology

Calvert Cliffs Vacation

by FrauRau

My friends and I took a trip to Calvert Cliffs this past September, and boy did we go at the worst time! The weather couldn’t have been nicer, but even though the skies were clear, Hurricanes José and Maria tag-teamed the east coast causing coastal flooding. THE WHOLE WEEK. And the tides never went down for us.. Somehow we managed to find a few teeth – and a few cow shark teeth! I was pretty stoked about those, and the gorgeous scallop shells!

Day 1 – St. Leonard. Pretty pitiful!
Day 2 – Brownies Beach
Day 2 Brownies Beach – also pitiful!
Best from Brownies Day 2
A Chesapecten fossil scallop – They were weathering out of the cliffs! I found this one in the surf.
Chesapecten. This one had both valves attached!
MORE Chesapecten!
A whole BED of Chesapecten!
Pretty tiger shark as found
Contortus
Parasymphyseal Contortus
Cow shark teeth – Uppers along the top row, and lowers along the bottom row
Hammerhead
Hemipristis
Two symphyseal Hemis! Lower on the left, Upper on the right (the serrated upper symphyseal hemis are reportedly uncommon)
Mako
Megalodon fragments
Porpoise teeth
Also a porpoise tooth
Ray plate and spines
Thresher
Tigers
My lone shark vertebra!

South Carolina Photos

by FrauRau

Here are some cleaned up photos of some of my favorite finds from South Carolina!

Megalodon teeth
That beautiful posterior meg that I found on the beach
Great White teeth
Mako teeth
Tiger teeth
This pic shows many of my favorites from sitting in the shell hash, and one that was given to me. Top arch: Fossil Ivory (given to me), fossil ivory that I found, a diseased vertebra, a deer tooth, armadillo scute. Lower arch: great white, great white, pufferfish mouthplate, posterior megalodon, garfish scale, great white, armadillo scute
An unidentified chunk of vertebra on the left, and a juvenile whale vertebra on the right
Diseased vertebra
Garfish scale
Pieces of mammal teeth including horse, mammoth, bison, and on the far left is a capybara incisor!
Capybara incisor
Some pretty shells that I found overnight!

South Carolina Beach Hunting at Night!

by FrauRau

We recently enjoyed a second trip to South Carolina, and found so many lovely fossils right on the beach! Whenever you visit a beach, go sit in the shell hash and you’ll find all kinds of cool things! These were found over a couple of nights of fossil hunting, but doesn’t include everything we found. That first night, I texted back and forth with my MoM as I found them and it was SO MUCH FUN!

First meg chunk of the trip!
This meg was buried in the shell hash!
Mako
Mako from previous pic
Great White – love the color!
Great White from previous pic
Great White
Great White
Great White from previous pic
Tiger
Tiger from previous pic
Megalodons, Great Whites, Bulls, Tigers, and part of a Mako!.
A super awesome find! A posterior Megalodon sitting right there in the shell hash!
Posterior Meg from previous pic
I found this gold Great White in the surf!
Megalodon on the left, Great White (both found in the surf), and Mako on the right
A Meg, Great Whites, Makos, and Tigers!
A huge chunk of a vertebra!

The prettiest Archimedes that ever was…

by FrauRau

This one is going to go down as one of my favorite finds in my fossil-collecting lifetime! I found this incredible, gigantic, articulated Archimedes in a road cut in Southwestern Kentucky in 1997. We found many delicate “corkscrew” stalks, brachiopods, and blastoids in the same area, but upon walking a little farther down the road I came across some oolitic limestone where this buddy had cleaved off and was lying on the ground in the brush beside it. That section of oolitic limestone was massive and not easy to chunk off, but there were a few other, smaller Archimedes in that also. You can see part of another one in the chunk with the larger one below.

Archimedes fossil

Archimedes fossil cross section
Archimedes fossil – top
Archimedes fossil closeup
Archimedes fossil
Archimedes fossil
Archimedes fossil
Archimedes fossil. This is how you typically find Archimedes because they are so delicate.
Blastoids found in the same area

Eureka Mine, Marion, KY

by FrauRau

Earlier this month, my misfit group of rockhead friends and I got to visit the Eureka mine in Marion, KY.  I’ve seen people post beautiful crystals they have found there, but I think other groups had been there since they last turned the ground, so I think we got their seconds. We filled our buckets, but when we got home, we found that the best crystals we collected were small. Many have been dinged and damaged by being turned over by heavy equipment, but we were very happy with the few that came home with! They were covered in the most impossible to remove iron clay, as were our tools, boots, buckets, EVERYTHING!!! Our feet were double in size thanks to the clay sticking to us.. and shoveling was like pushing clay on clay. STILL… fluorite! 🙂

The Ben E. Clement Mineral Museum was very cool.. and we ended up finding a few treasures there that we couldn’t go home without! Check them out sometime!

My favorite fossil – my Mississippi Globidens!

by FrauRau

I’ve been taking photos of my Cretaceous Mississippi fossils and am having a droolfest over my favorite of them all.. my Globidens alabamaensis Mosasaur tooth! It deserves its own page. Look at the rippled enamel. It is a work of art to me!

Globidens alabamaensis – a shell-crushing mosasaur
Globidens alabamaensis
Globidens alabamaensis
Globidens alabamaensis
Globidens alabamaensis showing root core

I will never forget the day I found it. April 22nd, 2016. My MoM and I took two days to spend at the site. When we got there, the water was muddy and high and a local was standing there shaking his head saying this was not the day to collect. We saw two snakes there two weeks before and as fearful as I am, I couldn’t sleep for the thought of them everywhere 🙂 We asked him about snakes and he said a woman got bitten by a water moccasin there the year before. He said he has seen mostly water snakes, but has also seen water moccasins and copperheads there, so he did absolutely nothing to squash my fears. We decided to go in anyway… it was my shark tooth “crack” addiction pushing me in. I brought snake gaiters to wear and the water ripped one right off my leg. Just a few minutes later I also lost my good sieve (which I thankfully found the next day). I was so upset that I took my MoM all the way down there and it was sure to be a bust (and that I “littered” on Earth Day, no less). She asked me if I wanted to go back to the hotel, and I suggested one more place to try first. We found a few shark teeth, and then, out of the muddy water, this beautiful Globidens rolls to the side of my sieve. I nearly lost it! As pretty as it is in these photos, it was glistening.. almost iridescent in the sun. It’s all I could think about the rest of the day. I was just thanking God that He gave me something so special and that he kept us safe from the snakes and high water.

Here’s a rendering of what Globidens alabamaensis, a shell-crushing mosasaur might have looked like in life.

Illustration ©Dmitry Bogdanov
Illustration ©Dmitry Bogdanov

Found a new tooth!

by FrauRau

I found a new tooth on our last trip! On this trip, I thought I had found a bunch of mosasaur or crocodile tooth fragments, but one of them was a swordfish tooth from this cool guy (or gal), Protosphyraena.

Protosphyraena rendering by National Geographic
Protosphyraena rendering by National Geographic

This week I found that I have another similar tooth, that is also likely Protosphyraena! This is not a common tooth from the site, so it is pretty exciting to add this to my collection! They are striated, missing the root, and a more flattened than the mosasaur, croc, and other bony fish teeth I’ve found there.

protosphyraena-1protosphyraena-2