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November 19, 2008

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Shark Teeth

one day trip at...

one day trip at LaFarge

10/13/2006 12:38:51 AM

legacyForum

725 posts

one day trip at LaFarge

I had a nice one day collecting trip at LaFarge last August, and thought I might share the story with everyone. I got permission to collect at the quarry for the State Museum since an ex-museum volunteer who lives in Maine was going to be in the area for a few days. I told my friend he was a lunatic for wanting to collect in the quarry in the middle of August with temps in the mid nineties. Add another 10 degrees for no breeze and the glare from the limestone and another ten degrees for the heat index and you get the idea. Well, he whined and cried and begged, so I finally agreed to take him into the quarry for one day only. We didn't actually get into the quarry until about 9 a.m. after signing in and meeting with various officials for several minutes, so it was a nice 90+ degrees by the time we really got cranked up. The bottom of the quarry looked like it had been dug as deep as they intended to go except for one "bench" of raised up limestone about the length and width of a football field, and rising eight feet above the bottom of the quarry. There were large boulders of limestone tumbled down the sides of the bench, and this is my favorite type of collecting in the quarry. You can find some superb Eocene shark teeth eroding out of the blocks if you take your time and look closely. We both started one one end of the limestone slopes, climbing around each block looking for goodies. We had only been collecting for maybe 15 minutes when my friend found a very large piece of fish bone showing on the surface of a large limestone chunk. I glanced at it from a distance by wasn't really all that excited by another fish fossil, so I let him check it out more closely while I headed for more boulders. Within only 20 feet from where my friend found the fish bone, I saw a whole bunch of bone that had tumbled down the slope during a previous rain, so I immediately headed up the slope to see where the bone originated. Halfway up the slope I was shocked to see a large mass of bone sticking out of the top of a limestone block the size of a basketball. The first thing I recognized was three or four mammal teeth sheared off horizontally in a jaw or maxilla section. There were other small pieces of broken enamel mixed in with the tumbled bone fragments, too. I called my friend over and together we tried to make some sense of what this might be, although I had a pretty good idea right from the beginning. We looked all over the surface of block and there was bone running everywhere. We could see that there was a mandible hinge showing where a mandible went the block, and portions of the back of the skull. Once we finally got the orientation of the bones figured out, we came to the conclusion that this was the skull of a dugong (a manatee-like sea mammal). The sheared off teeth were from the left maxilla which had broken and was sticking out from the skull horizontally at a right angle. I have been collecting in the limestone quarries in S.C. for 25 years, and this is only the second skull of a dugong I have ever found. Rib pieces are fairly common and a very rare molar may show up, but skulls are so fragile they rarely hold together. When I first found the skull, I had to walk half way across the quarry to my car in order to drive closer to the skull with all the digging tools. While I was bringing the car around, my friend checked out a few more limestone boulders, and by the time I got back, he had found what at first looked like a common fish rib of some kind. We both examined as much of it as we could where it was sticking out of a block, but couldn't decide for sure if it was a rib. Well, my friend decided to go ahead and dig it out, and when he did, the one complete end looked very similar to some of the Chandler Bridge bird bones we find in Summerville. And.... the shaft of the bone was hollow. It sure looked like a bird bone, but we decided to hold off judgement until it could be cleaned up a bit. We finally got the dugong skull excavated, grabbed up the block with the fish, wrapped up the fish/bird? bone and headed to the car. By now it was 96 degrees actual temperature, and a storm was moving in, so the humidity was max-ed out. We sat in the car and waited out the heaviest rain and then collected like mad men while the quarry was a bit cooler. We picked up some nice shark teeth, including two complete lower hexanchus agassizi cow shark teeth (my favorite), and finally decided to call it a day. It turned out that the three fossils we had found in the first 45 minutes of collecting were the best of the day. Once the loot was taken to the state museum, it turned out that the fish bone was actually a fish skull with the upper half an inch missing, as if it had been scalped. But any fish skull this big (about 6 inches long)was a rare and unusual find in the limestone. The dugong skull was more complete than we had hoped and the upper teeth on the uncrushed right maxilla showed that it was a older dugong when it died, with a lot of tooth wear. And the fish/bird bone? It turned out to be a bird bone after all! This is the only bird bone that I am aware of that is out of the limestone in S.C. The limestone was formed on the bottom of a deep ocean environment, and the number of birds per square mile out in the middle of an ocean is not that great. So, finding a bird bone in this environment is an extremely rare event. If anyone else has one that definitely came out of the limestone quarries, I would love to hear about it.
All in all, suffering in the incredible August heat was well worth it that day, with three killer finds to start off the day. But,I look forward to these nicer days now to go back in and search some more. Love that limestone!

10/28/2006 4:00:17 AM

legacyForum

725 posts

RE: one day trip at LaFarge

Great story - I went out to LaFarge last weekend for the dig and I didn't find much, but I was pleased that my brother-in-law found a couple of fairly large teeth. He was digging in the limestone, so when January comes around I will be looking for my piece to dig in too.

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