Fossil Hunting in Aurora, N.C.

This past weekend we went down to Ed and Nancy’s place in New Bern, NC. We were picking the kids up from a week’s stay at the grandparents. They had a blast. While we were down there we took a nice little side trip to the Aurora Fossil Museum. This is a small storefront museum in a town that is close to a Phosphate mine. In a nutshell, a million or so years ago, most of North Carolina was covered with sea water. At this time in history, Sharks were the dominate species in the water. So naturally a lot of them dying for whatever reason left them to be covered by layers of ocean bottom. The only things that remains from a shark are it’s teeth. Flash forward to today. A phosphate mine in NC needs to dig through a lot of waste material to get to their phosphates. That waste material is loaded with fossils, mostly sharks teeth.
Across the street from the museum is an empty lot where they dump truck loads of the waste material for the fossil hunters to paw through. We’ve gone a bunch of times. To the left is our haul for this past visit. The picture on the right is our best find ever. This was last Thanksgiving(06) where we found a 3-4 inch Great White tooth and some others.

Here’s a link to the Aurura Museum web site. And a link to some more pictures from our Fossil Hunting. Enjoy.