An old high school friend contacted me last year through Facebook. He told me that he had lease property with a hunting club in South Alabama. He wanted to know if I was interested in visiting the area to see what we could find in that creek? From my research of the area, it lay between two formations known as the Mooreville Chalk which is Cretaceous Period, time of the dinosaurs, and Clayton Formation the Pliestocene Period, time of the mammals.
This overlap of time periods could provide for some interesting finds! We set a date and my hunting buddies and I went down there sometime in May 2022. I got to ride to the property with my high school friend to catch up on our lives and enjoyed the conversation. It was a long drive but worth it! When we arrived we got our gear situated and head to the creek via ATV. First time I have ever driven an ATV and glad I didn't wreck it. As we came out of the woods onto a sandy beach with sand everywhere I had a dėjá vu. Had I been here before? I realized that this stretch of shoreline was similar to a stretch 12 miles up the creek I visited last year. Dang it looked so similar!
As soon as we got the gear situated we were off to sifting and it didn't take too long to find fossils, mostly Shark teeth, and some I wasn't familiar with but later found out most in my palm were from the Sand Tiger Shark that lived during the Pliestocene period? That told me we were finding fossils from the Clayton Formation.
So for most of that day I found mostly mammal fossils and shellfish and an interesting vertebrate from a snake! I don't know if it were fossilized or modern. I will have to get an expert look closely at it to give me an accurate identification?
The Snake Vertebrate and Gastropod steinkern were the most interesting finds of the day. The Gastropod was wholly intact, most of the ones found are usually broken and chipped in places... this one was not!
We've been very fortunate that on most creek hunts we find shark teeth and other marine fossils and on occasion we will encounter Native artifacts and are always on the lookout for those. This particular day didn't turn up any arrowheads but did find lots of pottery shards to bring home. I found three in particular that had designs on them. These samples appear to be near the lip area of the pottery?
On another note, I have no pictures to prove it, but I did get to fish some on a break. There was this dark hole near where I was sifting, so I dropped my spinner bait into it. Within seconds, I snagged a big bass and tried to land the fish. As I got him near me my line broke, he fell into the shallow current with the spinner bait still in its mouth! I tried to grab em', but to no avail! He swam back into that dark hole I caught him out of. So much for catching the big one!
It was a hot day that was for sure, but the cloud cover was also great. In Alabama, you can expect storms to pop up at anytime during the day and this day was no exception! As the day wore on, and later we could hear thundering in the distance meaning storms are a forming, and we need to be on the lookout for lightening... you do not want to be on a creek when that starts happening! Fortunately for us, it was getting toward the end of the day, and we were plumb tired from the heat, walking and sifting throughout the day. We were getting ready to wrap er' up.
We had only one ATV on the beach with us. So I fired it up and took one of buddies to the vehicle and came back and got the other one. We got back to the staging area to get changed, use the facilities and got our gear loaded and say goodbyes to our hosts. No sooner than we get that done the bottom drops, and it pours rain the entire hour or so till we get to Montgomery! What a great day of hunting, catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. We have an invitation to come back before hunting season starts and I can't wait!
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