Megalodons, Great Whites, Mosasaurs, and more from Holden Beach, NC

[fossil_lover_2277]

So here are all of my best finds from fossil collecting at Holden Beach. The coolest stuff to me is the Cretaceous PeeDee formation material. It gives a snapshot (albeit incomplete) of the material available in the PeeDee of NC. Usually many of these finds are sparsely distributed in this formation, but the dredging activity really helped concentrate it.

 

1st pic: mosasaur teeth and bones (jaw and rib fragments, verts, flipper bones), meg teeth, a horse tooth, a Pycnodontid fish mouth plate, a zipper oyster, and a mammalian astragalus, Lion's paw shells, and a cetacean cervical vertebra.

 

2nd pic: crow shark teeth, ray teeth barbs dermal denticle and verts, shark verts, angel shark vertebrae with prismatic cartilage, sawfish rostral teeth, enchodus teeth/jaw segments, crab claws, fish skull plates, and a croc scute

 

3rd pic: various sharks teeth, including great whites, bull sharks, tiger sharks, and various mackerel sharks

 

4th pic: soft shell turtle carapace and plastron fragments

 

[Al Dente]

Nice finds. We’re you able to find any echinoids that weren’t Hardouinia?

[fossil_lover_2277]

46 minutes ago, Al Dente said:

Nice finds. We’re you able to find any echinoids that weren’t Hardouinia?

Thanks. No, everything I found, and saw that others found, was Hardouinia. Other odd things others found that I didn’t included ammonites, rooted mosasaur teeth, a softball-sized mosasaur vertebra, mastodon tooth fragment, and some teeth that looked sort of like Xiphactinus or plesiosaur, but I’m not sure on those.

[Shellseeker]

1 hour ago, fossil_lover_2277 said:

So here are all of my best finds from fossil collecting at Holden Beach.

This would exceed almost all of my best days hunting....   How long a period hunting?

 

WOW, just WoW.... Congratulations  !!!

[fossil_lover_2277]

1 hour ago, Shellseeker said:

This would exceed almost all of my best days hunting....   How long a period hunting?

 

WOW, just WoW.... Congratulations  !!!

It was over about 4ish high tides, it wasn’t all in one day. A LOT of other people knew about the stuff washing up at Holden, so there was a lot of competition for collecting. Otherwise it would’ve been a gold mine..

Edited June 19, 2022 by fossil_lover_2277

[FossilDAWG]

When were you there collecting?  I visited about 6 weeks ago.  I found a decent number of Hardouonia but essentially nothing else except a couple of corals.  No vertebrate material at all.  Everything was high up on the beach.  There was nothing between the low and high tide lines, as the beach had already been raked to remove anything larger than sand.  I actually went to get some of the echinoids so I was happy.

 

Don

[fossil_lover_2277]

10 minutes ago, FossilDAWG said:

When were you there collecting?  I visited about 6 weeks ago.  I found a decent number of Hardouonia but essentially nothing else except a couple of corals.  No vertebrate material at all.  Everything was high up on the beach.  There was nothing between the low and high tide lines, as the beach had already been raked to remove anything larger than sand.  I actually went to get some of the echinoids so I was happy.

 

Don

May 23rd-May 25th. I generally started collecting an hour or so after high tide through to an hour or so before low tide, so about 4 hours at a time. The large shell beds left behind by the outgoing tide is where I found the stuff. Unfortunately people are saying they aren’t finding as much there now like back in May, it may already be over-collected.

Edited June 19, 2022 by fossil_lover_2277

[Plax]

Looks like you may have some Peretresius ornatus turtle shell there. The Pecten may be ernestsmithi but don't remember the genus it's been assigned to now. The crab claws and big Ischyrhiza rostral are impressive.

[fossil_lover_2277]

2 hours ago, Plax said:

Looks like you may have some Peretresius ornatus turtle shell there. The Pecten may be ernestsmithi but don't remember the genus it's been assigned to now. The crab claws and big Ischyrhiza rostral are impressive.

I just looked up Peritresius ornatus and the information on it was fascinating. Apparently it’s a sea turtle, not a soft shell turtle, and a complete skeleton has never been found. Makes sense, some of the pieces I found looked closer to a Carolinachelys wilsoni carapace/plastron (similar to a loggerhead sea turtle I believe) section I found in Charleston. It’s apparently hypothesized P. ornatus was capable of thermoregulation. The best specimen discovered appears to be from New Jersey: 

 

http://fossilsofnj.com/index_files/pornatus.htm

 

Also one of the crab claws has a small part of the moveable pincer still attached (I looked it up, said it was called a dactyl) so I was happy to get an idea of what that looked like.

 

I also found some big bone sections (didn’t post a pic of these), they look like rib bones, but I’m not sure to what. They’re big enough to be whale, but the whale ribs I’ve seen generally have some trabecular bone. These are dense all the way through, like dugong ribs, but they’re not like any dugong ribs I’ve seen. Going to show them to Dr. Boessnecker when I go down to Charleston this summer and get his opinion.

Edited June 20, 2022 by fossil_lover_2277

[fossil_lover_2277]

On 6/20/2022 at 3:06 PM, Plax said:

Looks like you may have some Peretresius ornatus turtle shell there. The Pecten may be ernestsmithi but don't remember the genus it's been assigned to now. The crab claws and big Ischyrhiza rostral are impressive.

Here’s a question. Out of the East coast Cretaceous formations, which ones are the most fossiliferous for vertebrates in your opinion? I know they find a fair amount of vertebrate material in Alabama’s Mooreville chalk. The New Jersey and NC/SC formations seem relatively sparse in terms of vertebrate material the more I read up on it. It’s an interesting comparison to the material from the formations out west.
 

 

Edited June 21, 2022 by fossil_lover_2277

[Plax]

Other than the Triassic and Jurassic lake etc deposits we have almost no freshwater environments preserved with vertebrate fossils. Out west is completely different as you know. They also have marine deposits of course, but deposited  on a more gradual gradient. We usually only get scraps concentrated in lag deposits here in the eastern marine deposits. Exceptions lie Hadrosaurus foulki are also here of course. am speaking in general.

[Spr]

What age/formation do you believe the great whites at Holden are from? I’ve been trying to find graphs on the sediment ages of the local beaches but I can’t seem to find much.

[Al Dente]

3 hours ago, Spr said:

What age/formation do you believe the great whites at Holden are from? I’ve been trying to find graphs on the sediment ages of the local beaches but I can’t seem to find much.

Pliocene and younger. In North Carolina, C. carcharias first show up in the Rushmere Member of the Yorktown Formation and are still swimming offshore today.

[Jared C]

What's going on on the NC coast right now will one day be the stuff of legends. Like really - y'all are experiencing a clash of two very different time periods with huge, charismatic megafauna, all on the SAME BEACHES! It's absolutely insane to me that one can find a megalodon 15 minutes after finding a mosasaur tooth - it's almost too good to be true!

[pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon]

That's indeed crazy for four days of searching! Wow... Just wow!!! I've said it before on the forum, but over here in Europe you would've find this amount of material in your wildest dreams! What awesome fossils!!

[fossil_lover_2277]

1 hour ago, pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon said:

That's indeed crazy for four days of searching! Wow... Just wow!!! I've said it before on the forum, but over here in Europe you would've find this amount of material in your wildest dreams! What awesome fossils!!

lol thanks. There were always tons of ppl scouring the beach too. Had there been less people out there, it would’ve been a real gold mine. And those echinoids, I got sick of seeing those things, literally hundreds to thousands of them 

[Plax]

On 6/20/2022 at 5:50 PM, fossil_lover_2277 said:

I just looked up Peritresius ornatus and the information on it was fascinating. Apparently it’s a sea turtle, not a soft shell turtle, and a complete skeleton has never been found. Makes sense, some of the pieces I found looked closer to a Carolinachelys wilsoni carapace/plastron (similar to a loggerhead sea turtle I believe) section I found in Charleston. It’s apparently hypothesized P. ornatus was capable of thermoregulation. The best specimen discovered appears to be from New Jersey: 

 

http://fossilsofnj.com/index_files/pornatus.htm

 

Also one of the crab claws has a small part of the moveable pincer still attached (I looked it up, said it was called a dactyl) so I was happy to get an idea of what that looked like.

 

I also found some big bone sections (didn’t post a pic of these), they look like rib bones, but I’m not sure to what. They’re big enough to be whale, but the whale ribs I’ve seen generally have some trabecular bone. These are dense all the way through, like dugong ribs, but they’re not like any dugong ribs I’ve seen. Going to show them to Dr. Boessnecker when I go down to Charleston this summer and get his opinion.

You ever get an ID on your ribs?

[fossil_lover_2277]

10 hours ago, Plax said:

You ever get an ID on your ribs?

Not yet. I still have to go down to Charleston and see Bobby, it’ll be some time this summer. I’ll update you once I see him. Also I PMed you two links to some paleo papers that are in review you might find interesting. They haven’t finished peer review yet, so I’m not trying to promote them much atm, but feedback so far has been positive.

Edited July 20, 2022 by fossil_lover_2277

[timothy b]

what are the two circled in red?

[bockryan]

I believe they are stingray barbs, tough to say from so far zoomed out but I'm pretty sure. 

[timothy b]

i have found some like this, but they do not have the serrated edges like the barbs have.  having fun just digging through the fresh crush and run dumped in my yard here by morehead city.

Edited Tuesday at 11:41 PM by timothy b

[Coco]

A close-up photo will be useful. A stingray stinger does not always keep its "hooks" when it is very worn.

 

Coco

[gwestbrook]

How long did you collect along the beach to find those?

[timothy b]

i live at the beach, but these are from a load of crush and run that i had dumped in our fire pit area from a local quarry.  i believe  this layer is from the Miocene and Pliocene epochs.

Edited Wednesday at 10:50 PM by timothy b