As most of you have seen and read, most of my summer has been spent on creeks hunting fossils. For good reason, it beats hunting fossils in an wide open space such as a open coal mine when the sun is beating down and it's 90 degrees or higher! Most of the creeks are in rural areas of the state and when access is gained, you have the water at your feet and old growth trees providing a canopy overhead blocking out the heat of the sun. The shear joy on being on a creek outweighs that of an open mine or quarry any day!
My next adventure takes me back to an area below Montgomery in the Black Belt. My research on the geography there tells me that the creeks contain fossils from the Paleocene era where Wooly Mammoths and other ancient mammals roamed Alabama. Then there is the slight overlap of Cretaceous material that is in that creek too, this period is the time where dinosaurs lived and began to die out. A group of us met in Greenville the designated meeting site, and then head toward the creek. Traversing the terrain in a two wheel drive can get hairy when the area is still saturated with rainwater from the storms the previous week! We had to stop short of our destination because a portion of the roadway was a mud/water bog and there was no need taking the chance to cross it and getting stuck. We all parked our vehicles at a campsite opening where it was drier and walked down to the creek area. When we stepped out of the woods onto the creek bank, it was covered in sand dunes looking like a beach on the coast!
I came here last year and the terrain was a lot different now than last year. It showed that over the course of the entire year, rains and floods can change the landscape over time! There was a huge gravel bar that I looked forward to digging in this year and now it's gone, washed away! You'd be hard pressed to find any gravel bar but in some areas such as the shoreline there were some. so I started sifting. Found a few smaller shark teeth starting off and then more, some bigger as well as other fossils. I just had to work a lil' harder sifting. I did encounter two fossil mammal teeth and was told they were from an Ancient Beaver and Deer from the Pleistocene era. The Beaver tooth was just lying on the edge of the shoreline pictured. The deer tooth came from sifting that gravel material.
Most of the finds that day were shark teeth from the Cretaceous Period. Also found a very worn Mosaurus tooth. Not far from this area to the North is a Cretaceous Period layer known as the Prairie Bluff Chalk. The overlap of geologic layers between the time periods are a dream for most fossil hunters, we get to collect fossils from both time periods... mammal, reptile and fish! In the picture below is an assortment of shark teeth, most of them, I have no idea what shark they came from... only one in the bottom center that is a conical shape belongs to a Mosasaur from the Cretaceous Period. The other teeth are a combo of both time periods? The picture on the right is a Coprolite, not from a shark, but from another species of animal... I will never know? The bottom picture was identified as an ancient Beaver tooth and the above picture near the beaver tooth is an ancient deer molar.
Other creature remains were found too, but mostly from ocean dwelling species, some I've never heard or seen before? With the help of a Paleontologist out of Mississippi, he was very helpful in identifying a lot of what I found, just too cool! I did lug a 2-gallon bucket of gravel for several hundred yards to micro sift later. The pictures below are some of the samples brought back home.
The top left picture is an assortment of bone, petrified wood, and near the center bottom are broken stingray spines. A Turittella shell attached to a Brachiopod... Turittella in the next picture are gastropods/snails with elongated shells that lived on the ocean floor. The bottom left picture is pretty rocks I found while sifting, some of them are quartz, calcite crystals, polished creek stone, and stone with mica flakes that light up when any source of light hits it! The bottom right picture features Bryzoans, Beekites, Gastropod/Turitella shell and Rotularia. I'm using a lot of scientific names here given to them by the Paleo folks, so if you want to know what they are just Google them... Google is your friend. This trip may have been the last to this site. I had lots of fun sifting for the treasures that came out of the creek there and at home sifting for micro fossils. What creek awaits us in the future and what will I find will be the question. I can't wait!
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