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Shell Creek Hunt


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Found out why they call it "shell creek". Loads of shells. It really is a beautiful river and was well worth the time we spent there. I found a piece of what would have been a monsterous mammoth tooth had it been whole but that was it aside from more shells than I have ever seen. I had heard of people finding shark teeth there but I just don't see it. Anyone else try that river before?

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  • 4 months later...

When I type in "Shell Creek. Florida" to Mapquest, it asks me if I want the Shell Creek in Fort Myers, Oviedo, Everglades, Punta Gorda, Deland, etc

Can you be more specific? I have been to Shell Creek in Punta Gorda -- lots of shell, but I found few fossils , mostly turtle and ray teeth -- no shark teeth. but maybe I went to the wrong place.

The White Queen  ".... in her youth she could believe "six impossible things before breakfast"

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Go up Prairie Creek. I have found some teethe up there. However I have found that mostly those two are more for just paddling.

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When I type in "Shell Creek. Florida" to Mapquest, it asks me if I want the Shell Creek in Fort Myers, Oviedo, Everglades, Punta Gorda, Deland, etc

Can you be more specific? I have been to Shell Creek in Punta Gorda -- lots of shell, but I found few fossils , mostly turtle and ray teeth -- no shark teeth. but maybe I went to the wrong place.

The shells are fossil too--actually probably older than the vertebrate material. The shells are Middle Pleistocene Bermont Formation (1.1-1.8 million years) while the verts are probably less than a million and deposited on top of the shell beds and washed into the creek.

Mike

"A problem solved is a problem caused"--Karl Pilkington

"I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit." -- Mark Twain

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I've hunted both these creeks a number of times. Shell Creek has superb quality later pliestocene shells, putting your craft of choice in at the boat ramp on Co Rd 764 approximately 3.5 miles east of St Rd 17 then heading upstream you'll eventually find quite impressive banks of shells. Praire Creek at one time yeilded me many very nice fossils until they made most of the creek I hunted a Charlotte County Park. The Problem with both these creeks is they converge in a manmade lake created by a low dam to provide drinking water for much of Charlotte County so much of the best fossil hunting grounds are covered with silt and slow moving water backed up from the dam so paddling upstream is necessary to get to any quality gravel beds.

                                                                 

                                                         “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum" 

                                                                       Descartes

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Shell Creek location. {From My Memory Banks}

I live on Shell Creek in Punta Gorda Fl. It is not a location but in fact a creek/river. It begins where it and the Peace river converge just East of the US I75 bridge. Peace flows ca. NE and Shell East where it separates into Prairie Creek again moving NE and Shell continuing East. For easy access use the Charlotte county launch Hathaway Park (Pay and Play)....maybe $.50 cents an hour, Easy canoe kayak access. If you want to do Prairie you can drive ca. a mile to a bridge over Prairie with a couple of parking places and a small primitive boat launch. You can also get to Prairie a little further up on Rt 17 at a sign pointing to the creek (this is before the Walmart Storage) towards Arcadia.

Been on both alot. pdanker1<at>netzero.com to get to me.

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  • 1 year later...

I've done both Shell and Prairie creek for fossils. Prairie I didn't really find anything... well 1 small bone and mostly mud. Despite growing up on Shell Creek I never put together the name of the creek with the sheer number of shells. I found zero sharks teeth in either river. Shell creek is absolutely full of shells, and you will see more exposed limestone in shell creek. I literally paddled upriver as far my kayak would let me- approximately 5 miles from Hathaway Park launch. At that point the silt buildup from the dam is no longer an issue. But once again, all i found were shells.

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