Posted on 08/17/2005 10:12:07 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Fossil Frank has a hypothesis - inspired by certain shells taken from deep in a limestone quarry abutting the Everglades - that a great tsunami hit Florida about two million years ago. It happened in the evening - and he can prove it. More of this later.
Before Frank Perillo became Fossil Frank he was an unhappy mechanic. He hated every day he lay on his back in Ketcham's garage.
Winter days were worst, because his hands turned to meat from the cold and the lacquer thinners he used to wash himself. When he jacked up cars, the ice on the bottom of them melted and dripped onto him like cold rain.
Ketcham's was a Chrysler shop in Fishkill, upstate New York, and in 1958 Frank rebuilt 275 transmissions there.
Fossil Frank recalled this, one recent morning, with amazement but no pride. ''Thirty years, I wasted,'' he said. ``I wasted my life.''
He realizes now - 67, retired in Miami - that he should have been fossil-hunting in Florida all that time.
Consider, as Frank does in his frequent presentations at the Miami Museum of Science, the variety of animal denizens since the peninsula emerged from the oceans 35 million years ago: ``Titanus walleri - a 12-foot bird with a beak that could slice through bone. Giant sloth, 20 feet tall on its hind legs. Tiny horses with toes. Megalodon, ancestor of today's great white shark - 100 feet long!''
On this morning he was looking for a giant olive shell, remainder of a species of univalve gastropod that died off three million to six million years ago. He was on the edge of the South-East Coast Quarry, a 1,200-acre limestone quarry on Tamiami Trail and 137th Avenue that belongs to Rinker Materials Corp.
He was accompanied by Chris Roth, the quarry supervisor, and Vicky Tomas, director of Miami-Dade Limestone Products Association, a mining industry group.
Frank believes that the SEC quarry - many miles away from the ocean's present-day shores - digs into the edge of a long-dead coral reef. Some of the quarry's pits are 95 feet deep. It is an excellent place to fossil-hunt and, as far as Frank knows, the only place in the world where a giant olive can be found.
This shell - up to eight inches long, dwarfing modern-day Olividae - is oblong, speckled and quite smooth, as if one flap has spiraled around itself.
All this was news to Chris. ''To be honest,'' he said, ``I've been in this industry 25 years and the only thing I know about rocks is how to crush them.''
The hunting party began near a water-filled pit Chris identified as Lake Number Four. Thirty-foot piles of white stone had been dug out of it, and a crane groaningly added to one of the piles. Cranes and lakes receded indefinitely to the north. White rock and melaleuca trees filled in every other direction. It was astonishingly bright and savagely hot.
''You never know where you're going to find a really good olive,'' Frank said, walking very slowly with his head down, blinking frequently in the brightness.
It was hard going. Every so often Vicky brought over a Busycon contrarium or Arcinella cornuta, and Frank tried to muster excitement - ''Oh yeah, you put some baby oil on that, it'll shine right up!'' - but after an hour he had not found one giant olive. ''This is a lot of Miocene-type rock,'' he said. ``This is chalk. Most of your fossils aren't going to be very nice.''
Frank has, after three years of fossil-hunting at the SEC quarry, found just a few dozen shells and fossils worthy of being entered into his collection of several thousand. Some those he bought; most he found. They fill the walls and closets of his apartment.
But certain of those finds have led to his hypothesis, which he introduced on the drive over to the north side of Lake Number Three: ``I've got a bunch of shells at home to prove it, and nobody can deny it.''
He has found a number of intact bivalves, some with holes drilled in them.
``Well, they shouldn't be that way! When a bivalve dies, the muscle goes limp. That's why, when you're on the beach, you see only half a clamshell, or half a muscle. They were buried instantly, under so much dirt that they couldn't open. And the holes - it was moonshells that did that, and they only feed at night. Now, I could see, if there were mountains and volcanoes in Florida, there'd be landslides, but it's flat as a pancake. So, I've narrowed it down to the tsunami.''
It was a fascinating hypothesis, and a thrilling climb atop millions of years of geological time, but it was getting on toward lunchtime. The sun had cornea-burning intensity; dizziness threatened with every step.
It was a bit of a relief when Vicky called ''Frank! Frank!'' and fast-walked over with what might be the smallest giant olive shell in the history of the world.
Wasn't Halliburton founded about 2 million years ago?
Mussel.
Could have been an impact-related tidal wave. There are inland deposits around the Gulf that suggest a huge wave washed stuff up.
Then there's Wash DC's Upland Deposits- could they be related to the Chesapeake crater?
Wave on, Fossil Hunter!
This guy should have his own TV show!.........
I live 5 mins away from this quarry. What the heck does a giant olive look like and will he pay me if I find one?
no tsunami, just Noah's flood.
say tsunami...say Noah's flood...
I don't know about Florida, but I've been to places in Texas that have circular shell type fossils 2-3 feet in diameter embedded in the rock, 100 feet off the river. I've always wanted to go chink a couple out......
I would find it harder to believe if they said it had never happened before.
Four thousand years maybe?
Science Ping.
This too, is George Bush's fault as well.
I don't know how he can discern that a tsunami hit from fossils. The whole state was under water millions of years ago. There are marine fossils over the entire state, and sharks teeth can be found in the sands. If you look at a map, you can see that the whole state is really nothing more than an ancient river delta where sand has built up from a river that ran down from the Appalacians into the ocean.
Nah. More like a hobbiest fossil-collector.
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Interesting !
Yup. My sentiments exactly.
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