The New Lowcountry SC Land Site

Fossil hunting has been slow since Winter started. I really don’t know where to look anymore so I did what any sane fossil collector would do. I looked for a new place. Sometimes new locations can be found quickly, but usually it takes hard work and research. The quick method never works for me, so it’s a good thing I’m always looking. Good news! Work has finally started at a spot I’ve been watching for what seems like forever and my patience and hard work to find a new place to hunt fossils has been rewarded.

We have known about the fossil bearing deposit at this location for sometime now, but for over a year we had only a single scoop of the deposit to compare to other formations we found in other locations in the Lowcountry. Before I go any further, I use “we” because I didn’t do all the work alone. I have to thank my long time friend (and now Geologist!) t$ for doing the lab and book research to pinpoint the age and name of the formation.

Work actually started in this location over a year ago, but few fossils were recovered because of the depth of the fossil bearing unit. The excavator hit one bucket of formation under at least 30 feet of sand, and for the last year, no other formation was recovered. Now work has moved northward and two geologic units are present there that were not found on the south end. And the original formation I described is not present further north where the sand is only about 12 feet deep and overlies a thick clay formation that is a light blue-green color and seemingly evenly distributed. That clay is about 6 to 10 feet deep and so far, no fossils have been found in it. We will watch as the piles erode because I refuse to give up hope that there is something in it. The next formation down is a fine-grained, dark green sand that is littered with small phosphate pebbles. This formation is also 6 to 10 feet thick and the base is a thin quartz and phosphate lag deposit. We expect fossils to be concentrated in the lag deposit, but also distributed throughout the green sand based on our experience with similar formations in other locations.

Our first hunt in the new green sand formation proved to be a decisive indicator of age. I concentrated my hunt away from the lag deposit and soon after I started digging I recovered a pristine cow shark tooth. This particular species was alive during the Miocene and Pliocene, and when t$ found another on the same day we knew the earliest the formation could be was Miocene. Then I found a modern Tiger Shark tooth and a Bull Shark tooth. The earliest record that we could find suggests that the modern Tiger Shark evolved around the end of the Miocene. I found another modern tiger on a subsequent hunt, and several other Bull shark teeth were found. It is now our best estimation that this formation is late Miocene to late Pliocene in age. To add icing on the cake, the weezling recovered a reworked 3 ¼ inch megalodon tooth. This site is without a doubt the furthest inland we have ever recovered a megalodon tooth. Another interesting thing we seem to be finding with regularity is large fragments of petrified wood that is green in color and covered with silica or pyrite which makes it sparkle!

I’m really excited about the new spot, both because it is actually producing teeth and because it will probably be around for a long time. I can only imagine the treasures we’ll find there if both of those reasons are true.