There are sites I consider moveable fossil feasts. This is not in a Christian liturgical sense where the timing of a religious observation shifts from year to year. Though a moveable fossil feast may, on occasion, exhibit some temporal impermanence, these feasts are much more about changing the locations of fossils. Nothing divine about them, but, as a result of taking fossils from one site to another, likely more accessible, site, moveable fossil feasts offer collectors wonderful opportunities.
This terminology is mine alone. I’ve never heard anyone refer to these sites in this fashion. To be clear, I do not apply this term to places like the shoreline of the western Chesapeake Bay where fossils move as they erode from the Calvert Cliffs. That process is natural. In contrast, moveable fossil feast are human-made. And, as such, the rewards they offer to fossil collectors are usually, but not always, a happy byproduct of the relocation of fossil-bearing sediment undertaken for some other purpose, such a beach replenishment.
This post offers brief descriptions of a few of the moveable fossil feasts with which I have some personal connection, either directly or indirectly, and one that I do not. At the conclusion, I briefly highlight these sites' singular virtue and the challenging issues they raise.
North
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina - A friend, sadly recently deceased, spent several weeks in
different years vacationing with his wife at North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. They walked the beach a couple of
times a day, outings timed with low tide. As they
went, they collected fossils – teeth, bones, shells – objects the waves had exposed
on the beach. A small sample from one
year is pictured below.
These finds were often a stratigraphic and chronologic hodgepodge, a nightmare for identification. Some came from the Pleistocene and Pliocene epochs (between 5 million to 11 thousand years ago), more from the Miocene period (23 to 5 million years ago) or the Cretaceous (143 to 66 million years ago). Among the finds over the years were pieces of fossil turtle shells, ancient horse teeth, shark teeth, pieces of fossil sand dollars, and ammonite fragments.
My friend surmised this mixture resulted from efforts to replenish the beach, presumably with material dredged from offshore sedimentary layers from different time periods. A competing or, perhaps, complementary explanation is that erosion of offshore sedimentary layers is the agent responsible for the fossils and their diversity.
C&D
Canal (Reedy Point, Delaware) – I collected here twice many
years ago. It is a site created by the
dumping of material dredged by Army Corps of Engineers in 1980 as it deepened
the Chesapeake and Delaware (C&D) Canal.
The fossil-rich material hauled to, and deposited at, this site came
from the Mt. Laurel Formation, dating from the Late Cretaceous.
Here is a view of the location on one visit more than 15 years ago.
What was practiced here was mostly surface collecting, practitioners wandering through the overgrown and exposed landscape, eyes focused on the ground. It was actually very easy hunting, though it took some time before the objectives of the searching came into view. Most abundant (and obvious) were the orangey, long, pointed belemnites, the calcitic skeletal remains from the tails of the Cretaceous squid, Belemnitella americana. Oyster shells (Exogyra) were also common. Pictured below are some of these fossils. An amateur’s rather old guide to the fossils from the Canal is suggestive of what could be found.
Is this site still there, still accessible? I don’t know. One source stated some four years ago, that the Army Corps of Engineers was planning to do more dredging and pile the dredged material on this site. Unfortunately, this “new” material was slated to come from a formation lacking fossils. Another source simply says it’s closed. Such is the fate of, at least, this moveable fossil feast.
Aurora Fossil Museum, Aurora, North Carolina – Located near the Lee Creek Mine, a phosphate surface mine that, when it was open to collectors, yielded stunningly beautiful fossils, particularly those from the megashark Otodus megalodon. The various Lee Creek fossils come mostly came from the Pungo River (Lower Miocene) and the Yorktown (Early Pliocene) formations. Not unexpectedly, the areas where we could collect, when we permitted into the open pit mine, were not pristine, not as they were originally laid down, but, rather, we needed to figure out which formations might have contributed to the areas in which we were collecting. For me, at least, that was not always clear.
Now, I don’t consider the mine itself to have been a moveable fossil feast because collectors went to where the fossils originated, albeit in strata that were highly disturbed by the mining process.
No, the moveable fossil feasts, for me, are the spoil piles of material hauled from the mine and deposited outside the Aurora Fossil Museum in Aurora, North Carolina. Purportedly, this material consists of tailings from the Pungo River formation which, even if true, does not locate these fossils within the various units that make up this formation.
When
I was last there – some 15 years ago – this was the view toward the spoil pile
where I hunted a couple of times, once when a trip to the mine was cancelled at
the very last minute and once after a successful hunt at the mine.
The museum has evolved greatly since then and, among other changes, now has two pits of material from the mine.
The finds were small, though relatively abundant; searching on one’s knees was rewarded. Here is a sampling of what turned up on one of my hunts through the spoil piles.
This moveable fossil feast is wonderfully accessible, located in a small town with parking just a short stroll away. It’s all rather domestic as attested to by the cat who oversaw my activities. (The cat may have had other intentions for the sand of the fossil pit.)
Bradenton Beach, Florida – The same friend who enjoyed the moveable fossil feast at North Myrtle Beach was vacationing one year at Bradenton Beach when he came upon this scene in a parking lot serving the beach.
Never inclined to ignore the possibility that fossils might be had, he explored these huge mounds of gray, phosphatic sand and discovered a true wealth of shells, most in fantastic condition. He spent much of his vacation climbing up and down this sandy landscape, gathering shells.
These were, indeed, fossil shells because he learned that the sand had been hauled to this location from an area quarry which he concluded was the SMR Mine in Sarasota, making these fossils Pliocene, about 3.6 to 3.0 million years old. Here are three beautiful specimens I obtained from him.
Though this moveable fossil feast was extremely accessible (in a parking lot, of all places), my friend searched these sandy hills quite feverishly because all of this material was slated shortly to be crushed to pave the parking lot.
Rotterdam Harbor, The Netherlands – This last moveable fossil feast, international in nature, was featured in Nina Siegal’s article titled On the Hunt for Mammoths which appeared on November 17, 2025 in the online version of The New York Times (print edition ran the article on November 19, 2025).
This feast has features reflected in some of the descriptions I’ve already provided of such sites, but there is a remarkable attribute that sets this one apart, prompting me to think – “The Dutch know how to do this.”
In the article, Siegal describes how people are hunting for fossils along at the Maasvlakte 2 beach, on the harbor shoreline in Rotterdam, benefitting from a beach reclamation project – no, more like a beach construction project. This beach is wholly constructed of sediment dredged from the sea floor of the North Sea, sediment roughly 2.5 million to 11,700 years old. This sediment comes from what once was a steppe where megafauna animals lived. As a result, the material used to build the beach contains the fossil remains of many land animals, such as woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, and giant horses. Sprinkled among these are fossils from invertebrates including sharks.
Now, here’s where it gets truly amazing. What sets this moveable fossil feast apart from the others I’ve described so far is the incredibly well organized scientific support for the amateur fossil collectors who scour the beach. In The Netherlands, these fossil hunters are permitted to keep their finds, but they are also encouraged to register them with the online Oervondschecker (“Primal Find Checker”), initiated by the Port of Rotterdam Authority and now maintained by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center. (The default language on the site is Dutch, so having a browser translate the text is useful for some of us.) As the website states: “Every notification will be reviewed within a few days by an expert. A find gets a provisional determination and an (estimated) time determination.” Marvelous.
How does Naturalis do that? Each collector seeking to register a find is asked to submit pictures of it with the precise GPS location of where it was found (ah, the wonders of the smart phone) or, at a minimum, they are advised to use the app to locate the find on its associated map of the beach. As the Naturalis Biodiversity Center explains on the website, the dredging operations were “accurately tracked,” including the depths at which the sand was “sucked up” during each trip. Data on the geologic origins of the individual layers of sand at the seabed in the North Sea feed into the Naturalis calculations. Further, where the dredged sand was deposited on the beach was also meticulously followed. As a result, the general provenience of a find can be determined and used to estimate its age. That is truly amazing.
In conclusion, my descriptions of these few moveable fossil feasts suggest a cardinal virtue as well as a couple of sins associated with them. The single most important positive attribute of these sites is that, as a result of human intervention, fossil-rich sediment has been moved from one location to another, a place that is typically much more accessible and convenient for collecting. Fossil hunting at them can be easy – e.g., going through the Aurora Fossil Museum fossil pits or walking the beach at the Rotterdam Harbor.
On the other side of the ledger, these sites have certain downsides. Having separated sediment from their original location, the makers of these sites (with the important exception of the Rotterdam Harbor beach) sever the ties between the fossils and the geological strata where they were originally found. Identification and age determination can be difficult, and sometimes, though not always, impossible – the finds on North Myrtle Beach, for example, are a challenge. Another key negative attribute is that they can be transient, sometimes offering only a limited opening for collecting - the material in the Bradenton Beach parking lot is a striking case in point.
Still, they are a wonderful phenomenon and taking advantage of them, no matter the challenges, is a delight.
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