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Lee Creek

Aurora, NC

Lee Creek Update

The DMS has 10 slots for the PCS (aka Lee Creek ) Mine, Aurora , Beaufort County , NC on Saturday, March 14!

Aurora is the premier locality on the East Coast for collecting Miocene age vertebrate and invertebrate fossils. Fossils that can be found at the mine include the remains of sharks notably C. megalodon teeth, whales, porpoises, fish, birds and mollusks. Information about this site can be found at www.elasmo.com.

If you are interested in going to Lee Creek with DMS, then call me at 302-838-0339 or email me at glauconite5@yahoo.com to sign up for the trip.

Only club members 18 or older whose dues are current will be eligible for this trip.

Aurora is about a 6.5-hour drive from Delaware . We will meet at the PCS contractor’s parking lot at 7AM on Saturday.

According to the following report on Elasmo.com posted on October 14, the Fall fossil collecting season at Lee Creek has been cancelled.

Say, "Goodnight" Gracie

Maybe not on a par with the Wall Street crisis or Junior's Goodyears, but a close second ...

Pat Young reports: We received some disappointing news on Monday afternoon. After a rather frenzied weekend of having to move stakes (both days) to accommodate the rising water and steadily flowing reclamation, Curtis Ormond of PCS Public Affairs and mine personnel decided it was in the best interest of all concerned to cancel the fall fossil collecting season at Aurora. In only three weeks, our collecting area has shrunk to less than half the size it was at the start of the season with predominately broken shell beds, clay and rocks remaining -- not the best areas to collect. Curtis assures us that plans for spring season should be on schedule with a new ramp and new tailings to collect by March-2009.

November 8, 2008, Saturday: PCS (aka Lee Creek) Mine, Aurora, Beaufort County, NC: (7:30AM+) Aurora is the premier locality on the East Coast for collecting Miocene age vertebrate and invertebrate fossils. Fossils that can be found at the mine include the remains of sharks, whales, porpoises, fish, birds and mollusks. (CANCELED)

November 8, 2008, Saturday: PCS (aka Lee Creek) Mine, Aurora, Beaufort County, NC. On November 8, 10 members of the DMS will have the good fortune of collecting at the world famous PCS (aka Lee Creek) Phosphate mine in Aurora, North Carolina.

Aurora is the premier locality on the East Coast for collecting Miocene age vertebrate and invertebrate fossils. Fossils that can be found at the mine include the remains of sharks notably C. megalodon teeth, whales, porpoises, fish, birds and mollusks. Information about this site can be found at www.elasmo.com

If you are interested in going to Lee Creek with DMS, then call in to sign up for the trip on Thursday, October 16th between 6:30 PM and 7:30 PM to Bob Asreen at (302) 838-0339.

Only club members 18 or older whose dues are current will be eligible for this trip.

Preference will be given to those members who have volunteered their time to the club either as an officer or by participating in the Show.

Aurora is about a 6.5-hour drive from Delaware. We will meet at the PCS contractor’s parking lot at 7AM on Saturday.

May 11, 2008, Sunday: PCS (aka Lee Creek) Mine, Aurora, Beaufort County, NC

December 1, 2007, Saturday: PCS Phosphate mine (aks Lee Creek) in Aurora, North Carolina. Since DMS has been given only 8 seats on the bus into the mine, there will be a call-in for this trip to Bob Asreen at 302-838-0339 between 7:00 PM and 7:30 PM on Thursday, November 15th in order to get on the list for the mine. Only club members 18 or older whose dues are current will be eligible to call in to reserve a seat. Please leave your name, phone number and email address on my voice mail when you call. You will be notified by email as to your status on the list for the trip.

April 14, 2007, Saturday: PCS Phosphate (aka Lee Creek) Mine, Aurora, NC. Ten members of DMS have reservations to visit the world famous Lee Creek Mine. Please meet at the Contractors Parking Lot at 7:30 AM on Saturday, April 14th. There will be paperwork to complete and the trip leader will go over the safety rules with you at that time. The bus will depart for the mine at approximately 8:00 AM and leave the mine by 3:00 PM. The bus will not return to the parking lot except in the case of thundershowers. Rain without thunder or lightning will not stop the hunt. Steel toed boots, hard hats and picture ID are required. The mine contains vertebrate (shark, fish, mammal and bird) and invertebrate marine fossils of Miocene-Pliocene age. See http://www.elasmo.com/ for weekly updates about the collecting at the mine.

All 10 Lee Creek spots have been filled, with an alternates list!

May 7, 2006, Sunday: PCS Phosphate (aka Lee Creek) Mine, Aurora, NC. Twelve members of DMS will have reservations to visit the world famous Lee Creek Mine. Please meet at the Contractors Parking Lot at 7:30 AM on May 7th. There will be paperwork to complete and the trip leader will go over the safety rules with you at that time. The bus will depart for the mine at approximately 8:00 AM and return around 3:30-4:00 PM. The bus will not return to the parking lot except in the case of thunder showers. Rain without thunder or lightning will not stop the hunt. Steel toed boots, hard hats and picture ID are required. The mine contains vertebrate (shark, fish, mammal and bird) and invertebrate marine fossils of Miocene-Pliocene age. See http://www.elasmo.com/ for weekly updates about the collecting at the mine. Call in to sign up for this trip on Wednesday, March 15th between 6 PM and 7 PM.

November 26,2005, Saturday We were there.

April 30, 2005 - Saturday. We recovered many fossils, especially some nice shark's teeth.

Karissa brought this Lee Creek
phosphate matrix with shark's
teeth in it to show at our
Annual Picnic 2005

Riker mounted shark's teeth & fossils another
member brought in to share

October 22-25, 2004 - Friday through Monday. Lee Creek Mine, Aurora, NC. We were fortunate enough to be able to enter the world famous PCS (aka Lee Creek) phosphate mine in Aurora, North Carolina on Saturday, October 23rd.

Good fossil resource for Lee Creek: Elasmo.com

Lee Creek Field Trip Slideshow, 10-22&23-2004 (IE)
Lee Creek Field Trip Slideshow, 10-22&23-2004 (N)

Green Mill Run Specimens Slideshow, 10-22&23-2004 (IE)
Green Mill Run Specimens Slideshow, 10-22&23-2004 (N)

Aurora Fossil Fest Slideshow, 10-22&23-2004 (IE)
Aurora Fossil Fest Slideshow, 10-22&23-2004 (N)

(Some slide show identifications made by:
Keith Robertson, Geologist
and past DMS President)

Out in the Field

Bob Asreen

North Carolina Fossil Collecting Trip - October 22-25,2004.

Fourteen (14) DMS members and their relatives made the trip to North Carolina for what has become a semiannual DMS collecting trip. They included: Karissa Hendershot and her parents, Fred and Jan; Scott and Gwen Peters; Skyler Streich and his mother, Barbara Sussino; Jason Barrowclough and his mother, Donna; Gene Hartstein; Blair Venables; Bill Stulpin; Jay Lockard; Sophie Homsey and yours truly. It was really great to see so many family members with similar interests!

With the exception of Karissa’s parents who drove up from Florida, most of us traveled down to North Carolina at various times on Friday. Karissa, Sophie and I caught up with Karissa’s dad, Fred, in Greenville and spent several hours exploring and collecting the lower portion of Greens Mill Run. We were joined later in the afternoon by Keith Robertson, who has recently relocated to North Carolina. Karissa found very nice Squalicorax shark tooth on a gravel bar and I found a 2-inch Carcharodon carcharias (modern great white shark) tooth lying in the creek bed. All told, we found a fair number of Cretaceous and Pliocene shark’s teeth and even a couple of small prehistoric potsherds. Skyler and his mom, Barbara, also spent the afternoon on another stretch of Greens Mill Run and found a lot of nice fossils including several great white shark teeth!

On Saturday, thirteen of us entered the world famous PCS (aka Lee Creek) phosphate mine in Aurora. We were joined once again by Keith, who has spent the season as one of the guides for groups going into the mine. Jason and his mom, Donna, spent their time collecting at the NC DOT spoil piles in Chocowinity and elsewhere while all of us were in the mine. Next time around, Jason should be of age to get into the mine!

For most of us, this was the first time that we were able to collect in the pit itself. The temperature was just about perfect for fossil collecting throughout the entire day! Although it hadn’t rained in 5 weeks, we all come out of the mine with a lot of fossil material including snail shells, pectin and clam, lobster and crab claws, fish jaw segments, vertebra and bones, teeth and vertebra of marine mammals (whale, porpoise, etc), shark teeth including a couple of small megalodon teeth and bird bones. The most notable find of the day was an exquisite and rare Notorynchus (cow shark) symphyseal tooth that Sophie collected! After leaving the mine, Gene drove back to Delaware while the rest us stopped off at the NC DOT spoil piles to screen for fossils.

On Sunday, Skylar and Barbara, Jason and Donna, Bill Stulpin, and Scott and Gwen headed north while the rest of us including Keith spent the day at Greens Mill Run. We had a great day of collecting! We found a gravel bar that yielded a large number of Cretaceous and Pliocene shark’s teeth including several Carcharodon carcharias (modern great white shark) teeth over 2½-inches long, a 4½-inch badly worn megalodon tooth, several nice mosasaur teeth, a couple of very nice saw fish rostral spines and lots of megabits and bone fragments.

On Monday, several of us (Fred and Jan Hendershot, Sophie, Karissa and I) drove down the Onslow Quarry in Richlands, NC to hunt for Eocene echinoids, nautiloids and shark teeth while Blair went back to Greens Mill Run to collect one more time before returning to Delaware. The collecting at Onslow Quarry was disappointing compared to past trips as recent mine expansion had left most of the outcrop covered with several feet of overburden that had not been washed by rain. After a couple of hours in the mine, we all headed back north.

All in all, we had another rewarding fieldtrip to North Carolina!