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I've found a rather unique fossil not ten feet from my front door. The decapitated, remarkably detailed head of a plesiosaur with at least ten puncture wounds and two shark teeth imbeded in the skull. As I worked to free it from the limestone I noticed the scales above the right eye and above the nostril have remained pliable. I've never seen anything like it and was wondering if such a find is common.

In January, @Metopocetus and I met to do some map work and go through some old documents in search of productive exposures of the Eastover Formation (which generally lies on top of the Calvert Formation in Maryland and Virginia). Like all good fossil hunters, we met at dawn to do a little fossil hunting first. The wind chills were below zero (F), but there was a blowout tide. We each found a fossil shell or two and some cool pictures of interesting ice formations along the Chesapeake Bay (below) and then retired, thoroughly frozen to a warmer spot to do our map work. Working with some 50 year-old publications and field notes, we identified a passing mention to a tiny layer within the Eastover Formation that MIGHT have fossil crabs and a concentration of vertebrate material. Within a few weeks, @Gizmo and I had worked ourselves into a lather over the possibilities. The sites are remote. They are basically not documented in the modern literature and none of us could find any published record of crabs from the Eastover Formation. It sounded like a good chance at finding a new species. We found ourselves completely convinced that we could do the impossible: 1) drive hours to a waterway that we had no experience with, 2) use 50-year-old information to find the sites and 3) then identify the crabs in anonymous clay beds in shallow, freezing water On February 12, I met @Gizmo at our favorite meet-up in the pouring rain and air temps around 40F. We spent a tense couple of hours on the road wondering if hurricanes, weather or riprap had erased the sites. Just a bit after dawn, we put the boat into the water and set out into a cold and gray day. Within an hour we had checked several potential locations and found the sites to be almost exactly as described. Within two hours we identified two nearly complete crabs as well as a pile of other goodies ranging from shark teeth to random fish vertebra. However, we were pretty bummed out that we had only picked up two complete crabs on the beach. While the tide was out, we worked in clay slicks in shallow water to find more. On a hunch, we kept every nodule that we found. We couldn't see through the mud and clay, and the clay was nearly waterproof when wet. Impossible to clean the nodules. Plus, the water was just way too cold. Near the end of the day, Gizmo found a megalodon tooth and several nice makos. Soon after, we found an associated set of vertebra that I kept for trading. Anonymous vertebra and skeletal associations are fairly common in VA, but I hold onto them sometimes to use for trading with other collectors or for donating to classrooms. At the very end of the day, I stumbled on two seal bones, a humerus and metapodial, in the clay underwater. We quarried them quickly in the freezing water and scooted back to the ramp just before sundown. In cleaning up the nodules, I quickly found that the dried marl washed right off. In the course of an hour of cleaning I found 25+ crabs that were largely intact, as well a seal astragalus. In all, we ended up with several coprolites, several pounds of fish, seal and whale bones, a variety of shark teeth, and an ecphora. The little association of dolphin sized vertebra turned out to have some surprises. Three vertebra, with one complete, one with broken processes and one that has been sheared by a large shark bite (on the right). The sheared vertebra was buried in the clay underwater, but came out without any damage. The bitten surface is sheared smooth ( a modern break would be jagged) and has the profile of a large tooth (still trying to figure out how to get a profile+tooth photo).