A Few Days in Mississippi ...

The purpose of his endeavor is to figuratively visit Mississippi for a few days and engage in studying Geology and other Earth Science-related subjects by way of posts, videos, and links. 

In my past travels (including Spring 2021), I have crisscrossed Mississippi countless times, between Atlanta and El Paso; between Atlanta and Phoenix; and between Atlanta and Oklahoma; and visiting close college-era friends in the Gulfport area.  

Overnight motel and RV stays have included Vicksburg, Jackson, Pearl, Meridian, and Tupelo.  And while helping with 2006 church-related charity work in New Orleans eleven months after Hurricane Katrina, my friends in the Gulfport showed me some of the damage in that area.

But other than visits to Civil War sites in Vicksburg and Corinth, I haven't had much time for any rock-hounding and/or fossil-hunting in the state, except for a 2015 photographic and collecting stop (images below) in the Loess Deposits of Vicksburg (but no fossils).  Mississippi is another of those not sufficiently-visited, in-between places between home and further destinations.  

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

As with other subjects, as personal schedules don't allow for as much planning and writing as I would like, the choice of Mississippi (for a few days) was a spirit-of-the-moment thing.  But it does serve the purpose of giving me (and my wife) ideas for possible future van camping travels.

At the moment, I can think of no "Bucket List" items in Mississippi, perhaps because I don't know the state well enough. 

While working for the State Geological Survey, in order to understand the Middle Eocene of the southwest part of Georgia the Inner Coastal Plain, I learned a bit about the Middle Eocene Paleontology of the Jackson, MS area as well as fruitful localities, partially by way of Mississippi Geological Survey publications and by email correspondence with Dr. David Dockery III.  But that was 20+ years ago and I don't know about access to such localities and I am not as "mobile" as I was then.  

As Middle Eocene sedimentary units are not well-exposed in Georgia, except local members of the Lisbon Formation, Middle Eocene Echinoids are not as well represented as they are in Central Mississippi and Eastern South Carolina (Santee Formation).  While working on the STATEMAP Project (mid-1998 - mid-2000), I did find the tiny urchins Echinocyamis mcneili (Sp.?), but other small Echinoids were represented only by fragmented specimens in the Middle Eocene Lisbon Fm., Blue Bluff Member.

Otherwise, I have briefly collected Echinoids and Brachiopods from the Santee Fm. in a Saturday solo visit to a Martin Marietta quarry, near Cross, SC years ago.  But I have been able to do ZERO fossil collecting in Mississippi.  Whenever I was in Mississippi in the past, I was usually with my family, thus collecting trips were not feasible.  (Not complaining, "just sayin'".)

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.