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#3200
Lee Cone
Participant

Kent  @kcrippen just a little more information about your find.  The Pungo material is by far the predominant material in the AFM “pit” where Victor @vperez filled the bucket for you.  The James City Formation (Pleistocene) is at the top level of dragline overburden.  They then remove another 30 feet of overburden to get to the top of the Pungo layer, and the layer of Pungo that they mine is lower still.  That material contains an economically large enough quantity of phosphate to lift out of the mine and wash (blast with water) to “float” off the phosphate.  The rest of the material falls through and is termed reject material.  That is the material that is trucked to the “pits” at the museum and around town.  Though it is conceivably possible for any specimen from a higher stratigraphic layer to be mixed in, I feel that you could be very confident that it is miocene in age.  The good news that I have heard is that the reject that is being trucked into the “pit” has not been washed at all or is only washed once instead of twice.  That has resulted in much better finds recently by collectors at the museum piles.