By: Jessica Nelson
Several times a summer, three vans depart the University of Alabama, bound for Shark Tooth Creek. For years, the Alabama Museum of Natural History has hosted fossil expeditions to the sandy creek bed where shovels full of clay and gravel can yield prehistoric finds.
The vans are packed to the doors with kids, parents, grandparents and a few amateur paleontologists who just love the hunt. The Alabama Black Belt represents an ancient coastline, so the fossil expedition site was once ocean shallows teeming with marine life, the hunting grounds of sharks and mosasaurs.
“Once you get in this creek bed and start looking through the gravel, you start seeing these 84- to 85-million-year-old marine fossils,” said Dr. John Friel, director of the museum.
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