A Tour of PG County...

I've been quite busy these last few months and I'm just now catching up on my trip reports; this one is from July.

    It was the 4th of July and I had just come back from my sisters soccer tournament (I'm a junior in high school) and received permission to go out fossil hunting by myself for the first time as I just got my license a few months prior.  I thought the cliffs and the river would be crowded being that it was the 4th of July and about noon.  So I crossed the river and headed inland to a few less popular spots.

    My first two spots were in the numerous streams which cross PG County and have exposures of fossiliferous formations.  The first one I went to had Eocene exposures and I found numerous large Turritellas and a few large oyster shells.  After a little while there, seeing that the variety of species there was limited, I went to another site, this one closer to D.C which had Paleocene exposures.  This site isn't one I found myself, so I was expecting a few other fossil hunters, but I was glad to find this stream completely empty.  Enormous internal molds of ark clams littered the stream bed and there was also a smattering of different shells as well as a few small shark teeth. 

   I would have stayed longer, however there was this one Early Cretaceous site that I had been wanting to get to before I had to be home before the festivites.  I had been checking out this site many times for the past few months and had nothing to show for my efforts except for pieces of lignite.  Today I was in for a treat.  Apparently the rains we had just a few days before wore away a lot of material because I found several whole oyster shells and numerous small pieces, which was exciting because anything other than lignite is uncommon for this formation as a whole.  But then, during my last sweep of the site I saw a small piece of bone sitting in the mud by itself.  Due to its small size I doubt whether its possible to determine whether it is from a crocodile or a dinosaur, even what bone it is in the first place (I'm thinking its a tail bone but I'm not sure), but it was still a very cool and rare find and made this trip worthwhile.