An afternoon on the Zandmotor

[Kane]

@Max-fossils - Oh, no not clean up in a literal sense! I meant the idiom in English (to clean up) which means to do well!  

 

But if you were also removing litter, I'm sure the environment thanks you!  I'm happy to hear that people who visit show respect, making it more or less clean.  

[izak_]

Very nice finds! Great report  

[Monica]

Excellent finds, Max!  The shells are beautiful, but that piece of mammoth tooth - WOW!!!

[Miocene_Mason]

Love the Mammoth, Gorgeous! I wish I could take the bus to fossil sites, I’d get out there way more often!

[ynot]

Some wonderful finds, congratulations!

Looks like a nice beach (weather permitting) to hunt.

Thanks for sharing.

[Max-fossils]

13 hours ago, DPS Ammonite said:

Thanks Max for describing the differences between modern and fossil shells.

 

Is it the dredging of the sand to create the beach that brought the fossils to the surface     

or do all nearby beaches also have a mixture of fossils and modern shells. Are the fossils washed in from offshore from older geological units as occurs in Florida? I'm trying to get a sense of where the fossils are comming from.

 

John

Nearly all of the Dutch beaches contain some fossil shells, and some fossil bones too, that wash ashore. But the Zandmotor (and the Maasvlakte 2 and the Hoek van Holland) have a much higher concentration of fossils because the sand that was used to build them was indeed dredged from North Sea sediments. And therefore the very rich fossil sediments of the North Sea got to these locations, which explains why the concentration of fossils there is much bigger. 

[Max-fossils]

13 hours ago, Kane said:

@Max-fossils - Oh, no not clean up in a literal sense! I meant the idiom in English (to clean up) which means to do well!  

 

But if you were also removing litter, I'm sure the environment thanks you!  I'm happy to hear that people who visit show respect, making it more or less clean.  

Oh okay haha, well I guess I learnt a new expression then! Thanks

 

People here are generally respectful, and I think that most of the litter found comes from the sea, and not from people directly littering on the beach. Also, there are many bins spread across the beach, so people don’t have to carry their trash with them all the time. 

 

Btw, I seemed to have had a small problem again with the replies, multiple ones appeared... could you please clear that up for me? Thanks

[Max-fossils]

12 hours ago, Foozil said:

Very nice finds! Great report  

Thanks Izak!

 

11 hours ago, Monica said:

Excellent finds, Max!  The shells are beautiful, but that piece of mammoth tooth - WOW!!!

Thank you Monica!  

 

6 hours ago, WhodamanHD said:

Love the Mammoth, Gorgeous! I wish I could take the bus to fossil sites, I’d get out there way more often!

Thanks Mason! It is indeed a privilege that I can just take the bus to go to my hunting locations  

 

5 hours ago, ynot said:

Some wonderful finds, congratulations!

Looks like a nice beach (weather permitting) to hunt.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Tony! It’s a really nice beach, very vast, nice nature and peaceful. 

[dalmayshun]

Max, it was interesting for us in America to watch the development of the lines about "cleaning up." Idioms are really funny. I have a friend in Norway, who actually squished a sandwich with her foot, that  she had gotten  for me, because in the process of asking her to go buy it, I said "step on it."   Our american idiom means "do it quickly" which point she missed, and still makes us laugh after several years. I know this has been unrelated to fossils, but I thought you'd get a charge out of it....oops, another American idiom. LOL. Beautiful fossils, by the way. 

[Max-fossils]

On 4/13/2018 at 5:28 PM, dalmayshun said:

Max, it was interesting for us in America to watch the development of the lines about "cleaning up." Idioms are really funny. I have a friend in Norway, who actually squished a sandwich with her foot, that  she had gotten  for me, because in the process of asking her to go buy it, I said "step on it."   Our american idiom means "do it quickly" which point she missed, and still makes us laugh after several years. I know this has been unrelated to fossils, but I thought you'd get a charge out of it....oops, another American idiom. LOL. Beautiful fossils, by the way. 

Great story, Rod!

 

Thanks btw  

[Plantguy]

Hey Max, nice report and fossils. Its nice to see similar aged material and some of the differences to what we find here in Florida...

 

Continued hunting success. 

 

Regards, Chris 

[Max-fossils]

6 hours ago, Plantguy said:

Hey Max, nice report and fossils. Its nice to see similar aged material and some of the differences to what we find here in Florida...

 

Continued hunting success. 

 

Regards, Chris 

Thanks Chris! To you too. 

 

All the shells here are Eemian in age, so from the late Pleistocene (120'000 years old). Usually, the FL fossil shells are slightly older, ranging from the Miocene to the mid/mid-late Pleistocene (I don't think any are as young as Eemian. Might be wrong though!). So there will definitely be differences. Also, Florida was (and still is, much to my jealousy! ) much much warmer than the Netherlands/North Sea! And an easy way to see this is simply by looking at the fossil shells. The species (or genera/families) of shells found in FL is very similar to what is found in NL nowadays or in the Indo-Pacific region; and very unlike the Dutch stuff (including older-aged shells, from places like the Zeeland beaches or Mio-Pliocene quarries more in the east of the country), which is still rather similar to what is found now in the North Sea. And just that is enough to be able to confidently say that Florida, even back then, was a much warmer place than the Netherlands, and has been so for a long time!

 

And that's one of the many reasons why I love bivalves and gastropods, more than any of the vertebrate stuff (don't get me wrong though: I still adore vertebrate fossils, their fossils often look much cooler!) Just by looking at the fossil shells that occur somewhere, one can tell what the environment was like, what the temperature approximately was, and other paleoclimatological things like that! So much to tell just by looking at 'boring' shells.