by Toby Stewart (March 2, 2013)
One of the amazing things about fossil field trips is that you get to step back in time and touch the fossilized remains of creatures that lived long ago. In the case of our Sandersville trip, we were able to touch and collect sharks teeth, Manatee bones, and sand dollars that lived in a sea that covered Georgia some 30 million years ago. It’s hard not be awed by that!
Trip leader and Paleontologist John Anderson, led the trip to Sandersville to collect in the Sandersville formation, an area that he has been researching for many years. Even though it was a chilly day, members from CCGMS and GMS were very happy to sift through the sands and gravels of the creek as they found numerous shark and skate teeth, manatee bones, turritella and sand dollars. Many sand dollars were visible in the limestone at a crook in the creek and Dion and John helped members chisel beautiful intact fossilized sand dollars from the limestone in that location.
Jim Stoops (pictured to the right) found an area in the creek where he dug quite far down and found very large sized bones and teeth. The picture below of his early finds don’t compare to the even larger pieces he found later in the trip. The region we collected in is a honeycomb of caves, sinkholes, and even a natural bridge, due to the surface water actively dissolving the limestone of the Sandersville Formation. Geologically such a landscape is called a “Karst Terrain”, which is more common in Florida than Georgia
The creek where we collected has dissolved a bit of a canyon into the limestone, and we used a rope line to help us down the 50 ft. embankment to the stream bed and all of its gravel deposits. As we walked up stream we could see where the creek had dissolved the sides and floor of the mini-canyon exposing many fossils along the walls as well as depositing fossils in the gravel bars where the stream meandered.
I think one of my favorite parts of the CCGMS field trips is the helpfulness and comradery among participants that is created by our Trip Leader and our other Team Members that are present on the trip. The Team Members go out of their way to help participants find great items to collect and many of them can advise participants on which rocks or fossils will be able to be turned into beautiful jewelry. I’m really proud of our Field Trip Team and if you haven’t attended a trip, plan to do so because you will have a great time and you’ll collect some great specimens.
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