m4's Inversand Trip

Well, after years of waiting for a trip to this spot, today was the day. I have heard about the Inversand Pit in Sewell, Gloucester County, New Jersey for years and have been looking forward to visiting this site. It has a reputation for Cretaceous Mosasaur and Crocodile remains, and often times the remains are associated. This spot also has a nice view of the KT boundary so a very cool spot to be at. I was hoping to find a Crocodile vertebra or two and maybe a few sharks teeth so with hopes high and 1.5 hour drive behind me I was finally there. It was a lot smaller of a place then I had imagined, so I decided after a quick walk around surface scouring this was going to have to be a DW type of day - find the layer and go digging!!!! It took a while to figure out what was the “layer” but after a helpful nudge from our trip sponsor I was hunkered down and digging. The layer here is referred to as the MFL or Main Fossiliferous Layer and is located in the basal Hornerstown Formation. I had been told that the crocodile fossils were very fragile so I decided to dig with a large screwdriver – no shovel or pick on this stuff. The layer was a very sandy marine clay and was extremely easy to dig through. After about 2 hours though, ease became replaced with frustration – I had found only a small section of turtle shell and had moved over 10’ by 4’ by 3’ of dirt!!! After considering a move to another spot, I took a break and decided to tough it out. While starting up, another DVPS club member came by to check out the hole. He mentioned that several years ago he had found a string of crocodile vertebra at the same level in the layer I was excavating and then, I kid you not, as soon as he finished his story, I hit some bone. It was way flakier than I had counted on and so I had to go get the paleobond from the car. With no plaster, and the layer too sandy to just remove in a block, our host gave me the idea of just spraying the area with the paleobond and let it set the whole thing in place – Great idea!!! There were a number of scutes and verts visible but it was going to have to wait a few weeks after drying out to see how many were really in there. I made sure that the host had no objection to me taking the specimen (it is a NJ State Museum research site) and he was cool with me taking it home – SWEET!!! A few weeks later I prepped it out. Some verts were good enough to remove as single pieces but there was a mass of bone that I decided to just prep in a relief pose. The NJSM host has identified the specimen as the small Cretaceous Crocodile Thoracosaurus, sp. In total there are 13 vertebra and over 5 scutes of varying size. No teeth, but there are some rib and limb fragments in there as well. Very cool!!! I’m creating a display jacket for the main section and kidding around with the idea to make a travel jacket as well. We’ll see how it goes….