First Hunt of 2024 - Holden Beach Once Again!

[Echinoid Express]

Hello everyone! I've once again made a return trip out to Holden Beach, which is my first trip of 2024. I briefly showed a few of my finds on my last report, but there were a lot of really interesting finds I've found that I'd like to show off. I didn't even realize I had some of these until I was sorting them earlier this week!

 

It was a fairly nice weekend for early February, with it being rather warm during the day, but about the usual winter cold at night. The crowds were elevated similarly to they were in December due to the coverage the beach has been getting online, but otherwise weren't too bad. As usual, the best times to go were in the late evenings and early mornings, though I did try to do some midday hunting with a couple of friends this time as well, who stopped by for a little while. The beach was covered in Peedee Formation sediment chunks from some mid and late December storms, which made for some interesting finds.

 

 

These are a couple of shots of my finds as I was cleaning them off. I picked up a fair bit of modern specimens as well this trip, which I'll show a little of at the end of this.

 

 

 

The first of my main finds is this really neat paired Exogyra costata, which is the first one I've found! I'll have to see if I can work on getting the matrix off of this one, I'm looking into air abrasion to see if I can speed up my process, and maybe make it better as well.

 

 

These are some Prehepatus harrisi crab chelae I found. This is the largest haul I've found since 2022, and the first I've found since February 2023! The left middle specimen and the one in the matrix have fairly decent fingers and dactyls, which are usually broken off beyond the end of the socket. My friend found a different segment of one leg, which isn't very common.

 

 

This is a fish skull fragment and a fragmented mosasaur tooth. I didn't luck out with the mosasaur teeth this trip, though my friend found a nice one fairly quickly once she started looking. 

 

 

I did find a decent number of shark teeth this time, which was nice! I haven't been focusing down on these the last few trips, so next family trip we'll be having in the spring I might try to look a little harder for them.

 

This is the first vertebra of this variety I've found since 2022, right after the beach work took place. My current thoughts are that it's from the primitive ray Brachyrhizodus wichitaensis, but there is some question if it came from an angel shark.

 

 

An array of turtle scute fragments, some of the largest ones I've found there. I'm not sure if there is any specific identification for these, although I've been told that a lot of them are from softshelled turtles. Some I've found from previous trips look almost like box turtles or something similar.

 

 

A horse tooth fragment. My friend came back again the next weekend and found a really nice intact one. Most of my finds are similar to this quality.

 

 

These are some steinkerns I found. The first picture is a bivalve of some variety, and the second one is of some partial ammonites.

 

 

This is a really interesting rock or phosphate nodule that has a shark tooth embedded into it! I've never seen a tooth in matrix quite like this from the area. It's far from perfect, but a really interesting piece regardless.

 

 

On to some of the Hardouinia mortonis echinoids from this trip, this one was a particularly tall and narrow specimen, which is fairly interesting. There are some really interesting variations I've found over the last couple of years, but narrow ones or tall ones like this are probably the least common variations I've found, and the fact that it is both is really neat.

 

 

 

This is a really interesting pathology I found, on the opposite side from my last one! This one unfortunately had some damage on the anterior end from the dredging pipe, and it started falling apart once I got it home and washed, so I had to stabilize the broken area with some strong adhesive.

 

 

Here are some of my favorite echinoids from this trip. I didn't total up all the ones I ended up keeping, but my grand total of lower grade specimens I've collected to donate between this trip and my December one is 322.

 

 

This last specimen is a broken one, but it is really neat in the fact that it shows the void of material present in most of these echinoids. This one obviously broke differently, but in a lot of specimens that are broken from the dredging process it tends to be in this area devoid of material. There are some small Scabrotrigonia bivalve molds on the aboral surface matrix.

 

This is a large rib bone fragment of some variety. I've always understood them to be sirenian ribs, due to their dense and heavy nature.

 

This is probably one of my best finds from the trip, a whole but small ammonite steinkern! I misidentified it as Sphenodiscus before, but after talking with some people I'm thinking it's a much rarer scaphitid ammonite, perhaps a Discoscaphites(?). It did break while in transport, but I was able to get it back together the best I could with the loss of material surrounding the break.

 

 

This is a chunk of Peedee Formation sediment with a bunch of small gastropod steinkerns throughout, as well as two sizable Scabrotrigonia bivalve molds on one side. I saw a lot of these molds this trip, but these were some of the nicer ones.

 

And speaking of trace fossils, this is another really good find from the trip! I picked up a lot of Exogyra costata oysters, but I didn't check them all very thoroughly while out on the beach, and didn't notice this until I cleaned it at home. It appears to be a bioimmured gastropod of some variety, existing as an impression on the oyster.

 

 

 

These are some other bioimmured mollusks on Exogyra oysters I found. One is likely some variety of Turritellidae gastropod, while the other might be a type of Cardiidae bivalve.

 

 

This is some material that contains what I believe could be trace fossils of burrows, but I'm not too sure. It also resembles the shape of some branching bryozoan fossils that are common in the area.

 

 

This little chunk of material contains two unusual steinkerns! I'm wondering if the cone shaped one is from a type of limpet, but as far as the gastropod one goes I have no idea what it might be. There are some odd round shapes on the surface of it that are visible much more clearly under my new UV light. I wonder if it's a type of turban snail or whelk.

 

 

And lastly, this is a chunk of Late Cretaceous Peedee Formation material containing a bunch of what I've always considered to be Heteropora bryozoan fragments and Exogyra fragments. However, the most interesting part of this cluster is the presence of appears to be a Biflustra bryozoan of some variety. I've seen them in Pleistocene material quite a bit, but never in the Cretaceous stuff. The surface detail shows better in the UV light.

 

 

 

And as a bonus, these are just some of my nicer modern mollusks and a sand dollar I collected that weekend. Holden Beach is really good for modern specimens, and I've found quite a number of them there over the years. When I eventually start an album of my finds from my travels and work on my Waccamaw Formation collection, I might try to have a side-by-side comparison of them with their modern equivalent, closest relative or direct descendant, just to show any potential appearances they might have had before becoming fossils.

 

 

 

And that's all I've got for now! I was considering going to Texas this spring with some friends, but I realized that was going to require too much time off of work to pull off, so I'll have to pass for now. I don't have anything planned before my family trip back to Holden in April, as well as a Virginia trip in May/June, but who knows what the future has in store.
 

Edited February 19 by Echinoid Express
Fixed identification on the first Exogyra trace fossil, fixed some grammatical errors and added some tags.

[automech]

Awesome finds! My employer owns a condo an hour south in N. Mrytle Beach. If we make it there this year, I'm making it a point to spend a day at Holden. 

[historianmichael]

The “ammonite” xenomorph on the Exogyra is actually a xenomorph of a gastropod.

Edited February 19 by historianmichael

[Echinoid Express]

7 hours ago, automech said:

Awesome finds! My employer owns a condo an hour south in N. Mrytle Beach. If we make it there this year, I'm making it a point to spend a day at Holden. 

 

If you are in the area I highly recommend it, in my opinion the plentiful Hardouinia echinoids alone are worth the visit! A lot of the other things aside from them and shark teeth tend to get overlooked, three out of my four crab finds were well above the high tide line that weekend. Early morning and late evening are probably the best times to go, as there is less competition overall, but even in the middle of the day we were finding some really cool stuff. There are some really nice locals who like to go shark tooth hunting in the middle of the night, and they're a blast to talk with.

 

5 hours ago, historianmichael said:

The “ammonite” xenomorph on the Exogyra is actually a xenomorph of a gastropod.

 

I had given it some extra thought after I made that conclusion and did a little more digging into it, and I believe you are correct, thank you for pointing that out! I'm not very good with ammonites, but I realized it was something convex rather than concave, which I imagine would rule them out in most cases. I probably shouldn't make my conclusions when Identifying things in the middle of the night, I get pretty excitable when I am in need of sleep, haha. I'm not sure if it could be identified based off of this trace fossil alone, and in general the Cretaceous fossil mollusks don't seem to preserve well in the formation, but It's still a really interesting impression! Whatever it was, it had a fairly ornate shell with a low spire. I took some pictures of a cast I made using some putty I had on hand, it's easier to see the form with this.

 

 

 

[suz]

thank you for sharing - neat stuff!