WaPoo has a very nice article on fossil hunting in Maryland, featuring a few of the people I know from the Facebook Calvert Fossils and Trip Reports page, New fossil-hunting group aims to help Marylanders find buried treasures. "Fossils from more than 600 species can be found in the area dating back to 23 million years ago."
Forgive Felicia Ludwig for getting all cosmic about it, but that’s just how she feels about fossil hunting. Ludwig found her first fossil on the sandy expanse of Calvert County’s Matoaka Beach in 2017. It was the mouth plate of an ancient stingray, a tiny bit of fossil that can easily be mistaken for a rock or bleached wood or even trash. But no — this was millions of years old.
“There is magic in feeling so small,” said Ludwig, 37. “You’re the very first human picking some of these things up. They’re 30 million years old, and you’re 37 years old. That idea that you are so insignificant — that really sings to me.”
A Maryland native who had enjoyed the outdoors as a child but now spent her days at a computer compiling data, Ludwig learned about fossil hunting from a friend. Ludwig tagged along on her friend’s next hunt and has been hooked ever since.
Ludwig is now in the middle of building a nonprofit group called Maryland Fossil Finders. Launched in September, the group aims to encourage more Marylanders to fossil hunt via learning the basics from webinars and gathering for regular guided walks.
And there’s good reason for them to give it a try: Maryland is uniquely peppered with remnants of long-gone geological eras. In 2023, scientists discovered a “bone bed” in Laurel, containing fossils from a number of dinosaurs dating to the early Cretaceous period, about 150 million years ago. That same year, an amateur fossil hunter and his family were searching the Calvert County coastline when they discovered a 650-pound whale skull that was 12 million years old. The find was taken to Calvert Marine Museum for further research.
I walked over that one more than a few times without seeing it.
With so much history waiting to be discovered in the region, Ludwig hopes to expand the ranks of fossil hunters.
“If you’re out there, you can find it,” she said. “But if no one is there, it’s possible it’ll get washed out into the ocean and nobody will ever find it again.”
The majority of the fossils in Maryland date to the Miocene age, which ran from about 23 million to 5 million years ago. Saber-toothed cats and mastodons prowled alongside the first dogs and bears. Elevated temperatures also meant higher sea levels, and much of Maryland was underwater, part of a shallow sea, said David Hoppe, a graduate student in Earth Systems Science at George Mason University and an avid fossil blogger. That area went as far west as Interstate 95 and as far south as Richmond.
In 2023, Ludwig went to the Calvert Cliffs the day after her grandmother passed away. “Granny, tell me where the big ones are,” she said to herself, and she found a pile of shark teeth.
“This sea was teeming with life, like fish, saltwater crocodiles, dolphins, whales and sharks,” Hoppe said.
Shark teeth are the most common fossil locally, Hoppe said, because these ancient sharks, like their modern equivalents, drop up to 10,000 teeth throughout their lifetimes.
It was a tough day for fossils on our beach today, only 3 teeth. Georgia found a pretty good White Shark tooth, but sadly, part of the root was missing.
I guess I don't mind if Felicia gets more people looking, as long as they don't find my teeth.
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