A perfect way to spend a rare, cool summer Saturday morning
Fossil hunting along Post Oak Creek in Sherman.
Saturday morning felt amazing! It was perfect for the outing my husband had planned for our family. As we made our way down to Post Oak Creek from the trashy side of the highway where we’d parked, I wondered how this was the same summer we’d been experiencing the last two months. We’d driven up to DFW the night before for a family visit and my husband, Chris, wanted to take some time to drive up to Sherman, near the Texas/Oklahoma border, to spend some time hunting fossils and shark teeth in a creek he’d been reading about for months. I knew hardly anything about this foray other than we would be wading through a little bit of water and that we were guaranteed to find shark teeth if we were patient enough.
We packed some water and snacks into a backpack, and toted along a sifter and shovel as we found our way down a well-worn pathway that lead to the creek. Someone else had pulled up right after we’d arrived, a man wearing full waders, and I hoped we weren’t getting into something we weren’t prepared well enough for!
The water levels turned out to be fine for what we were wearing and if this had been a Hill Country creek I might have considered swimming. But this was not that kind of creek, though the water quality appeared better than I had expected based on our roadside parking location.
It didn’t take long to start finding interesting shells and rocks, though it took quite a while to find our first shark tooth! Many shovelfuls of sand and rock were piled into the sifter and my son and Chris got to work looking through each of those shovelfuls, coming up empty.
We kept meandering downstream a bit to various rock/shell bars and I took breaks from looking down at the ground by looking at the plants in the creek. This escapee Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) had my attention as well as the attention of a skipper butterfly in that morning light.
I even found a bagworm moth caterpillar pupa that was empty.
And several instances of evidence that the racoons enjoyed coming down to the creek for water and foraging opportunities.
One of my first fossil experiences was finding a shell fossil at Lake Ray Roberts during a camping trip as a pre-teen. I remember taking the fossil back to my 8th grade science teacher to ask his opinion on how old he thought the fossil was. All these years later, I don’t recall what he told me but at some point I learned about the shallow sea that used to cover much of Texas during the Cretaceous.
There was a lot of time spent in this position. I actually ended up finding quite a few just sitting on the rocks and using a rock to dig through the sand very slowly, even spotting a few shark teeth sitting on the surface. Eventually my son started bringing handfuls of sand from the creek and dumping them on bricks or rock slabs and I would comb through the sand there.
I do not know fossils well at all and wish I was better at identifying these finds. This appears to be some kind of fossilized clam.
We spent about two hours on the creek before we finally decided we’d found enough to satisfy our curiosity. In addition to our shark teeth finds, we did stumble across what we presume to be bison bone fragments. There were also pieces of china and old dishes as well as plenty of modern plastic strewn about.
This was truly one of those bizarre and delightful ways to spend a few hours on a weekend morning and bonus points for the good weather! I’ve since looked up this site a little bit and I’m going to share a few links for those of you who might be interested in checking out the creek for yourself!
Post Oak Creek - The Fossil Forum
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
It really is sad to see all the development in North Texas. Land prices have sky-rocketed. More people and traffic. Yuk. It is same way from Denton to McKinney and from FTW to Decatur. Soon there will be no open spaces. :-(
Ah you were in my neck of the woods, North Texas. 😊 Nice haul! I had not heard of that creek. I will check it out sometime. Thanks for the links.