Easy Picking's

I'm adding a few more South Carolina fossil invertebrates for you invertebrate lovers. When people come into town, to collect fossils, they'll usually ask me to take them to anywhere they can collect shark teeth. Sometimes we end up in limestone quarries with the Santee Limestone formation. This hard limestone doesn't give up it's teeth without a fight! It requires a hammer, chisel, and a little patience. The teeth are few but there are thousands of marine invertebrate casts and molds. But to get them out in one piece requires more patience than the average fossil collector can muster. So very few invertebrates make their way home to private collections. And for those very few that do make it? They usually get put away when the collector finds out that they don't have the tools, or skill, to clean them up. It's a hard earned skill to remove fossils from hard matrix. From chemicals, to expensive pneumatic scribes, there's just too much work involved for the average collector. That's really too bad. A lot of fantastic fossils get passed up each day because they aren't "Easy Picking's". What's that? You'd collect echinoids if they had big sharp teeth! Whatever!