Eocene Fossil Hunting at the Cement Quarry in Harleyville, South Carolina

Perhaps 20+ or so years ago, I visited one of the Eastern South Carolina quarries near Cross, South Carolina, where very fossiliferous Middle Eocene limestones are found.  (Not sure if this is the one or not.)

It was a Martin-Marietta quarry (at the time).  As I was by myself on a Saturday afternoon, "playing hooky" from a rock and mineral show in Augusta, GA.  [My first wife and I were having a bit of a "rough patch" and - as it was before cellphones were around - I'm sure I would have received some grief for going 120 miles further east beyond where I had been working for several days that week (south of Augusta)].  In other words, if something unfortunate had happened, she had no idea where I was.  

Because it was my first (and only visit, so far) to this quarry, I wasn't 100% sure of the local "ground rules".  As it was, I was well-satisfied to walk to sand/gravel roads of the quarry and pick up numerous Brachiopods and Echinoids from the Cross Member of the Santee Formation heaped alongside the roadways by periodic scrapings.  In this area, the lithologies were "moldic" limestone, soft, easily-disaggregated limestone, and "marl".   In this link, I think the old names "Cooper Marl" and "Duplin Marl" have been discarded, though I don't know what they have been "replaced" by.

Echinoid species that I found included "Protoscutella" and "Eurhodia" and one crab unidentified carapace.  

If I saw sharks' teeth, I picked them up, but my ultimate goal was the Echinoids, while the Brachiopods were the bonus finds.  As both of these taxa were the same light-gray color as the matrix, I had to "train my eyes" to see the smooth, curved surfaces of the fossils.

For the short amount of time that I had there, I would say it was one of my most productive solo field trips.  This was before the age of digital cameras and I have to admit that I haven't performed all of the necessary background work to ID and prepare the fossils for photography.  [Now this is on my middle-term "To Do" list.]

Ironically, years later one of the other dads associated with my son's Boy Scout Troop occasionally worked in that area and knew some of the quarry staff members.  We wanted to schedule our own field trip (probably an over-nighter), but we just couldn't make our schedules work together.  So it goes.