By Natalie Eason Hampton 



If you want to find out how little 

 you know about fossils, just ask a child. 



My oldest tells me that fossils are 

 hard and lived at least 10,000 years 

 ago. Both my children, ages 7 and 5, 

 returned from school recently with bags 

 of gray dirt that contained marine 

 fossils they could readily identify. 



There's something inherently 

 fascinating to children about life-forms 

 that existed thousands to millions of 

 years ago. Tales of dinosaurs larger 

 than many modern buildings seem like 

 the stuff of mythology. 



Many preschoolers and elementary 

 school children can cite facts about 

 dinosaurs and other ancient life-forms. 

 And it's amazing how easily the impos- 

 ing scientific names — Triceratops, 

 Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus — roll off 

 the tongues of 5- and 6-year- olds. But 

 to see their skeletons, teeth, shells or 

 other fossil remains is to revisit the 

 prehistoric past never seen by man and 

 to ignite a scientific fire within a child's 

 mind. 



Armed with a copy of Fossil 

 Collecting in North Carolina, a publi- 



cation of the N.C. Geological Survey, 

 my family decided to try its luck at 

 finding some of these hidden treasures. 

 The book, published in 1989 and 

 reprinted in 1993, gives detailed infor- 

 mation on geological formations in the 

 state and lists specific sites where 

 fossils can be found, even by amateurs 

 like us. 



The first site we located was in 

 Greenville, near East Carolina Univer- 

 sity. The site, number 29 in the fossil 

 collecting guidebook, is the Green Mill 

 creekbed, where you can find expo- 

 sures of the Pliocene's Yorktown and 

 Chowan formations. 



The day we looked, rain had filled 

 the creek, and it took a few minutes to 

 find the designated spot where my 

 amateur crew could unearth a fossil 

 find. Suddenly, there it was: a wall of 

 gray-green clay with a layer of ancient 

 white shells glistening along the 

 water's edge, miles from the ocean. 



Because the creek was high, I 

 decided to go alone to the water's edge 

 to scrape a few shells. My husband 

 kept the children on the bank. When I 

 got down to the exposure, I was able to 

 extract a few nearly perfect bivalves 



with a small gardening spade. 



As we walked along Green Mill 

 Run from the fossil site toward a nearby 

 campus parking lot, we saw a few 

 smaller outcroppings of shells, some of 

 which could be easily reached by 

 wading in shallow water when the creek 

 was lower. 



The next day, our pilgrimage took 

 us to the Aurora Fossil Museum. 



The first room of this small mu- 

 seum gives visitors a feel for the bottom 

 of an open-pit phosphate mine such as 

 the one at nearby Texasgulf Inc. The 

 walls of the room duplicate the interior 

 of the mine, with different geological 

 formations exposed in layers. Also 

 included is a replica of the enormous 

 machines that scoop phosphate from the 

 pit. The buckets on these machines, 

 which look like alien invaders from one 

 of George Lucas' "Star Wars" adven- 

 tures, are the size of a two-car garage. 



The next room holds a collection of 

 fossils found in the Yorktown and 

 Pungo River formations. Children can 

 stand in the "mouth" of Carcharodon, a 

 giant prehistoric shark whose 6- to 7- 

 inch teeth can occasionally be found in 

 the mine spoil. 



But the main attraction lies outside 

 the museum where the mine spoil is 

 deposited in a vacant lot across the 



There's something 

 inherently fascinating 

 to c h i I d ren a bout 

 life-forms that 

 existed thousands to 

 mil I ions of years ago. 

 Ta I es of d i nosa u rs 

 larger than many 

 modern buildings 

 seem like the stuff 

 of mythology. 



street. Visitors can sift through the piles 

 at their leisure, finding shark teeth, sea 

 urchin spines, coral and small shells. 



Mary Weeks, museum director, 

 loans small digging shovels, plastic bags 

 and a trained eye to those who want to 

 try their luck on the spoil piles. Weeks 

 says she can find about a hundred shark 



18 MAY I JUNE 1994 



