Pinecrest Fossil Shell Material

[MikeR]

On a business trip to Tampa this week, I came across a shell pile containing typical Upper Pliocene fossil mollusks which probably originated from SMR.  Since SMR is no longer in production it might be a good opportunity for someone to start a nice little collection if you never had the opportunity to collect in the Sarasota quarries.  Since it is slated for road fill it won't be there long so if you are interested PM me and I will give you locality details.

 

Mike

 

[caldigger]

Whow, that's a lot of shell material!  Very nice looking specimens at that.  I live in the wrong state!!!

[Coco]

Arrrrgggggggg ! That I would like to find big heaps of shells near me ! They are magnificent and I love the Pliocene ! I would like to see a truck emptying in my garden ! That's it, I feel the electricity in my fingers so much my keyboard is wet by slaver !

 

Coco

[Phevo]

This is what dreams are made of....

 

[sdsnl]

That Architectonica is beautiful!!!

[fossiling]

If i were you, i'd shovel all that stuff into my back yard......

paleoCOOL!.  paleoLIKE!

[Coco]

Hi,

 

I would dream to have a collection of all the species found there ! They are magnificent and never of my life I would (have the opportunity to find heaps so interesting as those !

 

Coco

[smt126]

I want to be like Scrooge McDuck and just go jump in it and start swimming around in it lol. Although that might be a little painful

[tmaier]

Local people call these piles "fill dirt".

It would be nice to have delivery of this fill dirt to my back yard. ;)

It's often hard to find out exactly where these piles came from. I call this type of fossil hunting "Road Kill". You can find everything from Eocene to late Pleistocene in these piles on the side of the road. I've almost gotten into accidents on the road when I see piles and slam on the brakes.

On the down side, you don't know exactly the formation these came from, but on the up side you have an interesting mystery. You make a collection and analyze these shells, and try to use the collective assemblage as a diagnostic for figuring out the age and formation. So it's a guessing game.

[MikeR]

2 hours ago, tmaier said:

Local people call these piles "fill dirt".

It would be nice to have delivery of this fill dirt to my back yard.

It's often hard to find out exactly where these piles came from. I call this type of fossil hunting "Road Kill". You can find everything from Eocene to late Pleistocene in these piles on the side of the road. I've almost gotten into accidents on the road when I see piles and slam on the brakes.

On the down side, you don't know exactly the formation these came from, but on the up side you have an interesting mystery. You make a collection and analyze these shells, and try to use the collective assemblage as a diagnostic for figuring out the age and formation. So it's a guessing game.
 

 

There were five piles in total.  The two that I first pictured I am confident are from SMR as they contained the distinctive Upper Pliocene Pinecrest fauna and SMR is/was the only quarry that mined that unit and sold size sorted material.  The other three piles are not size sorted and have quite a bit of associated sand.  They contain many Chione bivalves, a lot of Strombus and some Sinistrofulgur.  These could be Bermont but I have no idea which quarry that material would have come from.

 

[tmaier]

This is a bit far for me to drive over, but if people do collect from these piles, they might want to keep the specimens separated for better analysis. So... you make specimen designations like "P1", "P2", etc. Treat these piles as separate sites! There might be a million years separating these piles, so you can extract more information by considering them according to their associated shells... don't mix them up!

Canal dredgings in that area commonly come up with rich seashell mixtures like that. It is difficult to figure out the age from just one species specimen, but the set can say something to you, as you have mentioned about the Pinecrest. Many of these species you see are still extant, and a single specimen is difficult to use as a single "index fossil", it is the set of species that becomes the index. Also, you might find some piles that seem to come from more of a lagoonal environment, or more of a shallow or deep water environment. Be observant of what is collected in what pile helps to determine all that information that a singe specimen can't tell you.

So if 20% of the shells are extant, it is quite old (Pliocene), and if 80% are extant it is much younger (Pleistocene), you get the idea...

Species tend to exist for about 2 million years, on average, but that is an average with a very broad standard deviation (a fuzzy number).

And then you end up with an amazing collection of associated species, but still don't know where they come from! very gratifying and frustrating at the same time!