NEW YORK SHELL CLUB NotEs 
Page 6 February 1978 No. 239 
SOME NOTES ON THE MOLLUSCAN FAUNA OF BREVARD COUNTY, FLORIDA 
Morris K. Jacobson 
-vird’ and not to be confused with 
rd Count ronounced Brou’érd) lies along the east coast of 
Preriie in the antral part of the state. Its big cities are Titus- 
ville (county seat), Cocoa, Merritt Island, and Melbourne. Its 
chief topographic features are the Indian and Banana Rivers which 
separate the mainland from a narrow beach strip along the Atlantic 
Ocean. It also has a variety of small lakes and streams. It is 
flat country with a top layer of sand. It forms part of the Pamlico 
Terrace which was under water as recently as ten to twelve thousand 
years ago. The Terrace includes most of Southern Florida to a line 
approximately from Sarasota to Fort Pierce, with a wide band along 
the east coast (including almost all of Brevard County) and a some- 
what narrower band along the west coast. This entire section of 
Florida, about one-third of the entire state and by far the most 
populated section, is the part that is expected to be under water 
again if the sea level rises even fifty feet or so. 
Brevard County is best known today as the home of the Kennedy Space 
Center at Cape Canaveral. This explains such names as Nasa, Apollo, 
Apollo 11 (Apollo Eleven, NOT Apollo the Second) and Gemini for lo- 
cal streets and Satellite Beach for a city. Even the local shell 
club is called the Astronaut Trail Shell Club. The county is also 
the home of Harris Electronics Corporation which was in the news re- 
cently as the supplier of electronic equipment to Idi Amin of Uganda. 
When I first arrived here I was surprised to see huge numbers of 
dead, whitened marine shells almost everywhere, but especially along 
the roads and highways. For a while I thought that these had been 
brought in together with white beach sand to help build the roadbeds 
of the highways. Never mind that it made no sense to lug in sand 
from the beach to areas already covered with sand, that's what I 
first thought but not for long. While biking along Minton Road in 
Malabar one day, I happened to cross a bridge over the Tillman Canal. 
I rested my bike on the railing and looked down into the slow-moving 
water, much of it covered by water hyacinth, that handsome but ex- 
ceedingly pestiferous introduced plant. Then I saw it: in the bank, 
about eighteen inches below the surface of the soil, was a foot wide 
layer that had been exposed by the digging of the canal. On quick 
inspection it turned out to be a layer containing huge numbers of 
fossilized marine shells. Then it dawned on me: the mysterious ma- 
rine shells which I had been noticing everywhere were the shells 
left behind when the Pamlico Terrace rose above the water. 
On a second visit I examined the exposure more closely and found 
that it ran for a long distance along the canal cut. ant shell 
Specimens had been washed out by rains, but most of them still re- 
mained in situ. From thes 
auawinesiadanas e I took a number of cuts to wash out and 
Brevard County (pronounced Bre 
The matrix seems to be a yellowish gravel whi it 
encloses, The shells themselves aa bnibdeas GE a cece be 
alae with both valves still in place. The shells all seem to be 
sede ne arn: Recent shells -- there are no interesting extinct 
niet € in so many other Floridian fossil exposures. The vast 
jority are bivalves; very few gastropods have turned up as of now. 
