Mr. Smith's Class Fossil Hunting Trip to Summerville, South Carolina

Last Thursday, Mr. Smith and students from his middle school class came to the Summerville South Carolina to do some fossil hunting. I was planning on helping them out, but they had a last minute change and had to go on a different day than originally planned. Armed with maps from the ditchweezil archives, the students and their teacher braved the creek alone. I gave them a call to check on them, and it turns out they had just quit for lunch. We met up at Dorchester Creek (the location in the maps on this site) so I could at least say hi to the kids. I pulled up and the kids came over with their finds which I did my best to ID. The location they hunted has many Oligocene fossils, about 28-30 million years old, and their finds from this time period included whale, fish, and shark vertebrae, as well as some shark specimens like the giant white shark Carcharocles angustidens, the grandfather of Megalodon. They also found snaggle toothed shark teeth, hemipristis serra, and the find of the day in my opinion, a complete parotodus benedeni tooth, the false mako shark. The rare find was about an inch and a half long and in very good condition. SC also has younger fossils, so the kids took home some of those as well. They found bull sharks, dusky sharks, and even a fragment of a tooth from the modern great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias. After I identified everything, I laid out a few fossils on the tailgate and explained about what is found here. I showed them a really big megalodon tooth, a really big angustidens tooth, a tooth from a juvenile wooly mammoth to show diversity, and a whale vertebra with obvious predation marks to show that these giant sharks really were eating whales. Each kid and adult then got to take home a fossils that I collected locally and from Lee Creek through my membership with the Friends of the Museum. Mr. Smith emailed me back a few days later to tell me the kids had a great time, so I believe this is yet another instance of how much fun anyone can have when they don't care how dirty they become.