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It appears that people can find Plio‐Pleistocene microtektites associated with and inside closed clams of the Upper Tamiami Formation (Pinecrest beds) of Florida. Maybe enterprising fossil collectors and citizen scientists could look for and find microtektites in other outcrops of Pinecrest beds. The paper is: Meyer, M., Harries, P.J. and Portell, R.W., 2019. A first report of microtektites from the shell beds of southwestern Florida. Meteoritics & Planetary Science. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/maps.13299 Blog post about micrometeorites in your house gutter Can you Really Find Micrometeorites in Your Gutter? Well... Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy. May 16, 2019 https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/can-you-really-find-micrometeorites-in-your-gutter-well Flecks of Extraterrestrial Dust, All Over the Roof The New York Times, By By William J. Broad https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/science/space-dust-on-earth.html Genge, M.J., Larsen, J., Van Ginneken, M. and Suttle, M.D., 2017. An urban collection of modern-day large micrometeorites: Evidence for variations in the extraterrestrial dust flux through the Quaternary. Geology, 45(2), pp.119-122. Open access https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/45/2/119/195213/an-urban-collection-of-modern-day-large Yours, Paul H.

Here is my trip report originally inspired by an announcement by Fossil Beach after noticing a large pile of shell hash laden material for parking lot fill that was spotted on Bradenton Beach. For reference, here is the original posting that instigated this trip: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/60966-fossil-shell-pile-at-bradenton-beach/ Kara (Khyssa) used this information to plan a (rather soggy) fossil hunting trip a couple of weeks ago when when was heading down to Tampa for a fossil club meeting. Her trip report (and her wonderful finds) is available through this link: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/61170-fossil-shells/ Through this forum, the source of the material in this pile was determined to likely be from SMR Aggregates of Sarasota. Jack (Shellseeker) had provided a great document from the Southeastern Geological Society (SEGS) that provided a great insight into the Pinecrest Beds of the Tamiami Formation that are very biodiverse in terms of shelled mollusks (over 1000 species recorded). For convenience, I'll repeat that link here as well: http://segs.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/SEGS-Guidebook-No-56.pdf And now onto the trip report itself. My mother was in town visiting for a couple of weeks from the chillier latitudes of the Chicagoland area. She had planned spending the last week of her trip over on Sanibel Island on the gulf coast of Florida. A friend of hers had rented a condo there for a month and she figured she'd chill-out Sanibel style for the last part of her trip. Rather than making the 3-hour trip to Sanibel to drop her and return on the same day, I was looking for something else to do on this roadtrip. We earlier had considered stopping at the Peace River and doing some fossil hunting on the return leg of the trip but this year the river flatly refuses to drop to a huntable level. We made a quick stop at the boat ramp in Arcadia to show my mom what the Peace River looks like (albeit in flood stage) so she can better picture what it looks like since I've told her many stories about past fossil hunting trips on that river. This is what it looked like when we passed through Arcardia--not quite ready for prime time yet. We continued west and soon arrived at Bradenton just in time to meet Pete for lunch. He's an ex-coworker of my wife's who was in Florida doing the snowbird thing. Post lunch we drove the final few miles to the bridge crossing over to Bradenton Beach (and the bumper-to-bumper traffic--and it's not even high-season). With the great intel provided by Fossil Beach we quickly spotted the shell pile and remarkably found parking spaces nearby on the beach side. We crossed over the street and noticed that in the lot where the big shell pile was dumped that there was a police car parked in the shade of the nearby trees. I walked over to the car and asked the officer if there was any problem with us scrummaging around in the pile to look for some fossil sea shells. His words were, "Knock yourself out." I joked that I hoped to be a bit more careful than that but he missed my dry sense of humor and stated that it was only a figure of speech meaning to do as I like. I smiled and thanked him taking his response taking it as tacit approval that he had no issues with us collecting shells before they are plowed into a crunchy mess in some nearby parking area. We walked over to the pile and immediately saw the incredible density of shell hash in this paving material. As expected, much of the material was hopelessly crushed and broken given its less than gentle handling from its origin to this pile. With a little bit of searching (and sometimes with the aid of a poking stick--a screwdriver would have been a good idea) we started to find some nice shells that were still intact. We walked around the pile and up one side to a little caldera like valley that had formed at the top. You can see in the last photo below from the top of the pile the steady line of traffic just a short distance from the pile.