by John Anderson
It was a wonderful day in the month of May when 18 of us from CCGMS went fossil collecting in a stream bed near Sandersville, Georgia. Well, it really was not May it was the last day of April. The temperature was not too hot or not too cold, just like Goldie Locks would have wanted, or was that another GL we all know, Ginger Lessard? Well, it was like a fairy tale of a day. Everyone had a grand time sifting through the sediment in the bottom of the stream for shark teeth, skate teeth, manatee (dugong) and reptile bones, and a host of other Eocene age fossils.
The Eocene age limestone that these fossils were coming from was the Sandersville Limestone, a very fossiliferous marine unit found on the Coastal Plain of Georgia. The participants also were able to chip out whole sand dollars (the species of these sand dollars is Pariarchus quinquefarius) from the limestone. They knew they had found a sand dollar because they are covered in algae, thus are green spots in the bottom of the stream.
The area that we were collecting our fossils shows evidence that the limestone has experienced dissolution by groundwater. There were karst features of natural bridges, sinkholes and even a cave. The limestone has also experienced silicification thus there are chert nodules within the limestone as well as some of the fossils have been silicified. The rounded limestone rocks found in the stream are often centered by chert and show evidence of dissolution channels (karren structures) the formed in the limestone. These rocks have an appearance of wrinkles, but they are not wrinkles but the karren structures in the rock.
At the end of the day folks were tired but they still had smiles on their faces.
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