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I dive the river as often as I can during the summer and found some interesting fossils on this July trip. The top photo has several nice teeth on the left and some great Native American pottery shards that are decorated. The bottom photo is a big chunk of petrified wood, but look carefully and you will see a pleistocene horse tooth wedged into a crevasse in the wood. I did not remove the tooth and have left it as nature and the river deposited it.
@lcone Hi Lee! I’d love to see your photos. It looks like the file size on the attached document is too big for the website though. Maybe upload a few documents that are smaller in size?
I spent several days 40 ft down, diving the black waters of the Cooper River last weekend and had two great days on the river. About 120 teeth total, but most were split, fragmented, damaged, etc. I have attached a few of the more notable finds. The Great Whites are 2.5 and 2.25 inches respectively, and the larger of the two horse teeth molars is 3 inches long. The meg is 3.4 inches slant. Also pictured is a partial tuna hyplural tail vert
Lee (@lcone), thanks for sharing these photos! Can you tell me more about the tuna hyplural tail vert? Which one is it in the photo? I think I can ID the horse teeth (middle row, right hand side). Is the tuna tail vert to the left of the longer horse tooth? I’m assuming it’s a unique/interesting find because it’s more uncommon than sharks’ teeth. Is that true?
As a related question, I know that black river diving is just that–black river diving, but are there divers like yourself who use GoPro cameras to show what it is like? That’s a type of fossil collecting that is both interesting and so foreign to me. It’d be fun to see what it’s like to go out in the field with you.
Do you take field notes when you get back to your boat after a dive? You should do your own webinar on black river diving 🙂Hi Lisa- I’m sorry- I think I sent my reply to only you in answering your question. I will attach a photo of three hyplural verts that are a little more complete than the one from the Cooper River. Note the last vertebrae attachment, followed by the hard tail structure. The structure stiffens the rigid caudal fin of fish like tuna, bluefish, and marlin that swim with tuniform motion, rapid vibration of the tail for speed, as compared with fish, such as bass and bream, that use undulating motion, a soft full caudal fin, and therefore less speed (but allows for hovering in easy currents).
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