LordM October 2017 giveaway (theme: "Treasures & Discoveries")

I do hope you will get that representative type set. Have you tried web searching for similar examples?

 

A Rainy Day In Georgia (Fossil Hunt, June 12, 2017)

I was stuck at home, sweltering because our power had been knocked out by a big thunderstorm (not uncommon in the summer in our rural home). So since the rain had quit but the power was still out (and would remain so for over two hours), I decided to get into my car, crank the A/C in there, and ride out to see if the rain had washed out any fossils on my usual sites.

(Hey, why not take my freshly-washed and vacuumed white car out on a muddy country road after the rain? What could possibly go wrong there? Haha)

First, let's get the mandatory cute-critter pix out of the way.

Pete & the Giant Toadstool
All this rain has had some big toadstools popping up overnight. Here's Pete the cat checkin' one out. Looks like he took a big bite out of it, but that chunk was already missing.




The Greeting Committee
L to R: Flash the kitten cat (on railing), Teddy (shepherd mix dog), Dixie (border collie mix dog), Pete the cat. My furry buddies are always glad to see me when I get home! Say it with me now... "Awwww".




Down at the Boat Ramp, After The Rain
It's not a big area, but there are lots of fossils in that sand. After the rain is a good time to find shark teeth! Victoria found her first one there, years ago. She was little at the time. The fossil wasn't!




Boat Ramp Location
The boat ramp where I hunt fossil shark teeth is walking distance from where I live. It's a relatively small area, but has produced a lot of shark teeth over the years.




First Little Shark Tooth
First shark tooth found on June 12, 2017. Nothing special, really, but you can count on finding at least one or two of these on almost every visit to the boat ramp, if you keep a sharp eye out. We have found a few big ones, too, but most are small like this... or extremely tiny. Note how much shell and tiny fossil fragments are in the sand.



Out Bladen Road
A rainy day on Bladen Road, in the rural western portion of Glynn County, Georgia. There are miles and miles of sand road out here in the middle of nowhere. The sand is from dredge spoil material brought up from the bottom of St. Simons Sound, so it's full of small fossils and shark teeth, if you know where to look. Rainy days like this are good for shark tooth hunting, but perhaps not so good for my freshly-washed white car. Oh, well. Sometimes you've gotta get stuff dirty when you're out hunting.




The Abandoned Boat
Here's an abandoned boat, out in the woods, miles from the nearest water. Looks to be 1960s vintage, but it hasn't been there too long. Somebody must've just dumped it off a trailer. Anybody want a free boat? This is the third time I've found a derelict boat in an unexpected (landlocked) location. Given my track record, maybe I should book an expedition to find Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat, huh?



The Tree Tunnel
This is a pretty - if desolate- stretch of Bladen Road. In the springtime, the noise of singing frogs and insects fills the air here.




Rocks on the Road
We don't usually have rocks here in our sandy topsoil, but this dredge spoil from the sea bottom does have chunks of sandstone(?). It's in these "chunky" concentrations where the bigger shark tooth fossils are usually found.

Mood music, anyone?




OK, this "chunky" stuff looks good. Time to get out of the car, since the rain has tapered off to a drizzle.

Find the Shark Tooth!

Can you spot the shark tooth in this photo? If so, you've "got what it takes"!

That's the nice thing about this kind of searching. No special equipment is required. Just a sharp pair of eyes. Anyone from little kids on up can enjoy this pastime. (In fact, little kids can be quite good at it, since their eyes are younger, and closer to the ground.)




Here- I'll Point It Out
There it is!




Shark Tooth In Hand
Meh. It's not the best- the tip is missing- but I'll take it!




The Mysterious Leaverite
Interesting rock. I don't know what the strange little pockmarks are, but it could be fossil or mineral inclusions. Bears further examination.

Note there are possibly two more small shark teeth in this picture (circled in red) that I totally overlooked until editing these pictures later!



Short Video Clip of the Mysterious Leaverite

I'm not sure what this rock is. Here's some shaky cellphone video from the field, shot on my antique iPhone 3. As mentioned, the mystery rock has some odd craters and inclusions in it, maybe fossiliferous? I haven't weighed it, but suppose it's around two or three pounds or so.

I know my coins and relics pretty well, but I'm mostly clueless about geological specimens. I love the term "leaverite". Look it up, if you're unfamiliar with it.




That's all for this outing. Thanks for coming along with me.

I hope you'll join me again next time!

~RWS

 

(Note: the article in this post was written circa 2012, with a general - not necessarily coin collecting - audience in mind.)

DIGGER'S DIARY: THE ARCADIUS ANOMALY



Did the ancient Romans ever make it to North America? That’s doubtful. However, some of their coins did, over the last two millennia. This is a 1,600 year old bronze coin of the eastern Roman emperor Arcadius, dating to the turn of the Fourth century AD, probably around the year 395. And yes- believe it or not, I found it right here in coastal Georgia! Technically this one wasn't found in the Golden Isles proper, but just a bit north of here, on a colonial site in Liberty County.

The crazy thing is, I didn't even have my metal detector with me that day, and found it almost by accident. The coin was laying right on the surface, where it had been washed out of a sand roadbed by recent rains. It did take a sharp eye to spot it against the grey sand. I thought it was a modern Lincoln cent at first, because I didn’t have my glasses on. But when I picked it up, I immediately knew it was too thick and too heavy to be a modern cent. In fact, since I’m a part-time world coin dealer and an avid collector of Roman coins, I knew right away what it was, though I was completely dumbfounded as to how it got there.

Though it lay on top of the ground, I do not believe it was recently lost by a collector. Not a modern collector, anyway. I think it was in the ground for at least 150 to 200 years, judging from the context of the site where I found it. Other artifacts were in that washout. I had picked up a gun flint from a flintlock musket and some old pieces of plantation-era pottery moments before.

I have two pet theories. Either it was lost by an early collector (a famous 19th century antiquarian happened to have lived nearby), or it came over a bit before that- maybe on a boat from England during the colonial era, where such coins are commonly found. In the early days of the American colonies, small change was scarce, so people spent just about any kind of coin they could get their hands on. This might have circulated as a farthing (a quarter of a penny) in the 1700s, and nobody would have given it much thought at the time.

Sixteen centuries have taken their toll on this piece, but it still has some clear details. The obverse (or “heads” side) bears a portrait of the emperor. The reverse shows him standing with a globe in his left hand and something else, perhaps a military standard, on his right. The inscription GLORIA ROMANORVM (“Glory of the Romans”) is quite readable on the reverse.

So I’ll bet you think this coin is worth an emperor’s ransom, eh? Think again. It’s worth maybe ten or twelve bucks, tops. On a good day. I've bought better Roman bronzes for five bucks. Though certifiably ancient, these are very common coins … in Europe and the Middle East, where vast hoards are found. But here in Georgia, in an American archaeological context? Not so much. Here, it is a truly amazing (and anomalous) find. Was I disappointed that it’s not worth a fortune? Nope. I was thrilled and fascinated ... and a bit baffled, too. If only it could talk!

 

It happens periodically, often on colonial sites like where I found that one.

There was a Roman coin of the short-lived emperor Otho (who ruled only a few months in early 69 AD) found aboard the wreck of La Belle, which was the flagship of French explorer La Salle's 1685 expedition. La Belle sank off the coast of Texas in 1686.

So someone aboard La Salle's flagship was carrying a coin that was already over 1,600 years old!

(PS- I've seen photos of the Otho coin in the online exhibits of the La Belle artifacts. It was very low key and hardly mentioned. The photos aren't of very high quality but it clearly shows Otho. There is a possibility that it is actually a "Paduan" medal of the Renaissance period that imitates an Otho coin design. But if that is the case, it was still centuries old when it sank with La Salle's flagship!)

 

Yes, and I have had an antiquarian's soul since I was a little kid.

 

Love gettin' them old War nickels in change. I've found a lot over the years, including several rolls' worth from a convenience store one time.

 

(Note: perhaps a bit too much personal blather in this story from April. Fun fossil find, though.)

A walk in the woods on an April morning, with fossil finds

I've been in a bit of a slump all year so far, with some minor physical issues and a few mental ones. (This has been a rather longish depression by my standards. I'm mildly bipolar and prone to such mood swings. Nothing suicidal or straitjacket-worthy, mind you- it just means I periodically withdraw from most social and Internet activity during the "down" cycles. I've learned to live with them - without medication- and call them my "hermit" or "Yeti" phases.)

The good news is that so far (as of April 27th, 2017), I'm still not smoking, having put my thirty-year, pack-a-day cigarette habit down (hopefully for good!) as of New Year's Day.

This year I spent the entire Spring season indoors, when I should've been outside at least now and then, swinging a metal detector or looking for fossil shark teeth or just out walking and getting some sun. Even my hobbies (except reading or watching TV) seem to fall dormant when I'm in a depressive cycle.

But enough about all that. It is, after all, still Spring outside! And I'm alive.

Here is a photo I took beside our driveway earlier this month, when the Japanese magnolias were blooming and there was a neat looking spider web in the morning dew.




So... yesterday, April 26th, I decided to make myself go outside and walk a bit.

I live out in the rural part of Glynn County, Georgia. Out here, we have some sand roads that run through the piney woods. One near my home, Bladen Road, connects East Nowhere to the Lesser Boondocks. (Actually, it connects Highway 99 with the Old Post Road). It's mostly just trees and deer and raccoon and such. Not much "civilization" around, but it's a nice area to live.

There are quite a few places around here to tempt metal detectorists and relic hunters with long-vanished antebellum plantation sites, but yesterday I did not have my metal detector with me.

Just to get outside for some fresh air, I decided to walk Bladen Road to see if I could pick up a fossil shark tooth or two. (Well, walk and drive- more driving than walking, really, since I am so out of shape and easily winded these days.) The nice thing about hunting fossils on these sand roads is that you can creep along in the car at 5-10 MPH and slow down or stop when you see a likely spot, then get out and walk.

You see, the sand roads in this area are all surfaced with sand that comes from the Andrews Island dredge spoil site. This is where the boats with huge dredging equipment deposit all of the sediment that has been pumped up from the bottom of the Atlantic shipping channel between St. Simons and Jekyll Island, GA. This sand is full of prehistoric fossils, mostly whale bone and shark teeth.

You creep along until you see piles of chunky sandstone "rocks" beside the road. In this area, we have sandy soil and under normal circumstances, you do not see rocks in the ground. So when you spot them on the side of a sand road here, that's an immediate clue that you've got some dredge spoil with fossils in it. This is immediately apparent from the amount of seashells. Then you'll see darker flecks in the sand. This is often fossilized material, with chunks of whalebone being the most common. The fossils are a flat, jet black and stand out in contrast to the whitish sand. (The enamel on shark tooth fossils here tends to also be jet black but glossier, or a darker, battleship grey.)

Yesterday I rolled up on a few of these spots where there were clumps of rock on the shoulders of the road. I got out and walked one of them, admiring a tall, naked pine tree that had a very large bird at the top of it. I thought this was a bald eagle at first- we have those here and I saw one just last week- but this time the bird atop the tree turned out to be a turkey vulture. (We call 'em "turkey buzzards" in the South.) It flew off before I could snap the hasty cellphone picture below.

It's been pretty dry lately. Usually the ditches have standing water and frogs in them. I once saw a small alligator cross the road near here, which was really surprising, since it's a good mile or so from the nearest river or marsh.




Strolling along and carefully examining all the dark flecks in the sand, it wasn't long before I came upon a few fossil shark teeth. The first was a small one from an uncertain species. The next was a decent sized lower tooth from Isurus hastalis, an extinct shark from the Miocene epoch. Not bad... not bad at all! I felt myself starting to perk up.




Note that one of the little darker flecks in the sand moved.



This was not a fossil, but rather a living specimen of Arachnea scarethecrapouttaya, the Lesser Southern Oh-$%#*! spider.*
(*By now you will have realized I'm an amateur and no paleontologist or naturalist, so take all my scientific nomenclature with the proverbial grain of salt. Except that spider ID. I'm fairly confident I'm right about that one.)

I continued walking a while, enjoying the scent of the breeze, which smelled faintly of pine trees and green things and maybe a hint of flowers somewhere, though I couldn't see any. I guess after five months of this experimental nonsmoking thing, I'm getting a sense of smell again for the first time in thirty years. (This can be both a blessing and a curse.)

I looked down and-
Whoa, Nellie! There's a nice BIG tooth in the sand! Looks intact, too!
At two-plus inches long, it looked to be a smallish C. megalodon or a big C. carcharias (Great White shark)... either of which are very nice fossils to find!

Here's a cellphone shot of the fossil in situ... exactly as it lay, as yet untouched by human hands after traveling 5-25 million years through "deep time".




It turned out to be another I. hastalis, this time a very large upper tooth. Though usually smaller, these teeth can be up to three inches long, I believe. I've found some decent sized ones, and owned even larger ones that friends found, but I believe this one is the largest I've yet found, personally. These are fairly common shark tooth fossils in this area, but this particular specimen is quite big for the species.




This tooth was a really sweet example. It has some reddish (iron?) mineralization stains on the root which add character. I like the way the sand shows inside the cracks on the enamel of these. It was those cracks that made me know this was a big tooth before I even picked it up. A smaller tooth would have just broken into pieces. When the enamel is cracked like that but the tooth is still intact, you know you've got a big 'un!

Here is the curved (lingual) side, which would have faced the inside of the shark's mouth. Again, along the upper row of teeth- I just learned that the upper teeth on many species tend to be more triangular and flattish, while the lower teeth (like the first example I found, above) tend to be more rounded, thick and pointy, if smaller.




Below is the flatter (labial) side, which would have faced the outside of the shark's mouth. In other words, the side you might (not) have seen coming at you as the giant beast blasted up from the murky, primordial depths to grab you!

I don't know how big this shark would've been, but it's safe to say it was pretty huge. The largest living Great White sharks alive today have teeth barely this size! In fact, I've read that these Isurus hastalis may have been direct ancestors of the modern Great White.



So anyway, that's all I've got for this story, which probably ran a bit long anyway. Thanks for joining me on my little walk. Maybe I'll take you along on another later, if you like.

~RWS