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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.

This past Saturday I had to make the drive down to Tampa for the Tampa Bay Fossil Club meeting and decided to spend the day down in that area. Another forum member had mentioned that there were fill piles of fossil shells at Bradenton Beach so I decided that it was the perfect time to check them out. I had planned on getting an early start since I had a couple stops to make but a friend from out of country called and we ended up chatting for about an hour. So I didn't manage to get on the road until 10:30 and by then it had started to rain lightly on top of the weather being a bit on the chilly side, the high for the day was supposed to be 61 degree F. The first stop was an hour south in Tarpon Springs to pick up some riker mounts with jem jars in them. I picked up four with different sized jars. Then it was on to Bradenton Beach which should have been around an hour and a half drive. No such luck. What I hadn't taken into account was there was a boat ragatta taking place on the Manattee River right in the middle of Bradenton that had closed down one of the bridges which caused all kinds of traffic snarles. It ended up taking me nearly 3 hours to get there and it still hadn't stopped raining. By now any sane person would have called it quits and found something else to do but not me. I'm just too stubborn for my own good sometimes! I got to the beach just after 3:00 and quickly located the shell pile. The rain had slowed to a light mist although it was still pretty chilly. I parked near the pile, put on my jacket, and grabbed a bucket before strolling over to the pile. Not surprisingly everything was covered in mud but I wasn't about to let that stop me. After all I'd planned ahead and had a change of clothes in the car although I did forget to bring a second pair of shoes. Let me say right now that I didn't get a single picture of the location but if you take a look at Fossil Beach's post he has some. I was amazed at the number of shells in perfect to near perfect condition, including several varieties that I've not found before. And a surprising number of them still had hints of their original color. Many of the small shells still had that slick outer coating on them even. My plan had been to leave no later then 5:00 so that I had plenty of time to stop for dinner before the club meeting at 7:30 but with how wet everything was I left my phone in the car and had no way to keep track of the time. I didn't end up leaving until 5:30 and was soaked to the skin by then. But if I hadn't had somewhere to be I could have easily stayed there until sun down. As it was I only got to search about half the pile and only got to give the other half a quick look over. Several trips were made to the car to empty my 2 gallon bucket into the 5 gallon one in the back. I also filled up the smaller bucket so that means I left there with about 7 gallons of fossil shell and a few pieces of coral. I didn't actually get home that night until midnight so I had just enough energy to unload the car, spread some of the muddy shells out to dry overnight, and then went straight to bed. Sunday morning I woke up with quite the sore back from all that heavy lifting in such chilly weather but it was well worth it. I spent the much of the day sunday using picks to clean the worst of the dirt off some of the shells and found some real jems. And still have most of them to sort through. I won't know exactly what I have until I finish cleaning everything up which might take a couple weeks. In the meantime here are some pictures of what's clean so far. So far my favorite finds are the large cowrie shell and sharks eye which still have hints of their original color. Both shells have only minor damage and are rare to find at this size and in such good condition.