Summer rains bring an end to the Peace River fossil season and for those of us who spent a good part of the last several months digging there, we’ve been feeling a bit lost. Since I live in the Orlando area I sent out a query through the Fossil Forum looking for summer fossiling locations in north central Florida. Fossilers can be very tight-lipped about good digging sites so I was happily surprised when someone responded with a couple of spots in Jacksonville. The provider of the information now lives in Texas which might explain his generosity with directions to his former Florida sites, but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
I loaded up my truck and hit the road by 4:30 am in an attempt to avoid the worst of the heat. Silly me! I arrived at my first destination, Quarantine Island in the St. John’s River, shortly before 7 am and the heat was already killer.
Crossing the river was uneventful but I have to work to control my fear. I wasn't raised around water and boats and a kayak is so close to the surface. Who knows what's lurking in the depths of that dark channel?
Not the most scenic area in Jacksonville.
The island is as big as a small city, desolate and full of trash, heavy brush, and snakes. I’m not afraid of any of those things IF I have the proper gear. I didn’t. Brush pants, sturdy boots, and a can of industrial-strength DEET are musts, as well as a raised sifting screen (easily constructed by attaching a river screen to the top of a walker purchased at a thrift store).
I call this "Still Life With Snake and Trash."
I did my best to avoid both.
What I had was plenty of water, sunscreen, and an obsessive need to find fossils so I did some surface hunting in a large gravel covered area directly across from my launch point. Considering that I only spent about an hour looking, the results were promising, the best being a mako (1 and 3/8” long) with some root damage but a beautiful pearlescent color to the blade. I also collected a small mako blade, a little chunk of mammoth tooth, a hemi upper, and a large but cracked alligator tooth.
Who knows what a full day’s digging in cooler weather could turn up?
My other stop was Ponte Vedre Beach, about 30 minutes from Quarantine Island. The Fossil Forum contact had given very specific instructions regarding this area as it is a neighborhood of high dollar homes and they don’t want my 1995 Ford Ranger parked in their front yard. I don’t really like it parked in my front yard, either, but that’s another story. I parked where instructed, an easy quarter mile walk from the beach, and got to the waterline at the start of the ebb tide.
I’ve done my time beach combing, logging countless hours looking for little shark teeth on Manasota Key, and I don’t really want to do it anymore.
Here's a pic from a cold-weather beach combing foray with a friend, whose face is blurred until I have her permission to include her picture in this blog. :-)
So there I was walking along Ponte Vedra beach, mentally poo-pooing it as a waste of time, when I saw the unmistakable shape of a shark tooth root protruding from the crushed shell at the tide line. I almost couldn’t believe it as I picked up a tooth from a great white shark! I’ve never found such a big tooth on a beach before and I’ve never found a tooth from a great white shark before! Measuring 1.5”, it has good serrations and a worn but complete root.
The great white tooth is on the left and the mako on the right.
Needless to say, I’ve done a mild revision of my opinion regarding beach combing and I am sending happy thankful thoughts (and emails) to everyone who’s been generous with their fossiling information and I will continue to seek summer fossil sites north of I-4, but mostly, I want this rain to stop so I can get back to the Peace River!
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