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Adventures with fossils

By BILL COATS
Published March 11, 2005

[Times photo: Mike Pease]

Seina Searle holds up a bone fragment she found in the bottom of the Rainbow River in Dunnellon last week. In the clear river, she and her husband, Michael, have found a tooth from a megalodon, a giant prehistoric shark; the upper molar of an equus, a horse extinct for at least 10,000 years; and their most prized discovery, a set of ancient bear teeth that now belong to the state.

	Michael Searle shows off a bone he found. He’s interested in what lived thousands and millions of years ago here: huge sloths, sharks and armadillos, tiny horses, humpless camels.
	Michael and Seina Searle look at their finds from the Rainbow River hunt. Michael heads the Tampa Bay Fossil Club, which has 500 members and a popular newsletter.

Paul Lien, a veteran fossil hunter, introduced Michael and Seina Searle to "blackwater diving" in slower rivers where the water is so dark you need lights to dig for fossils.

"You're going to find the most stuff where everybody else hasn't been," Lien says.

But the darkness can be disorienting and spooky.

Michael Searle was scraping the bed of the Hillsborough River near Fowler Avenue when something soft and heavy pushed across his shoulder and neck. Searle glanced to his left and saw the hind leg of a 4-foot alligator passing his ear.

Searle "came flying out of the water," said Lien, who saw it from a boat. "You're down there in a ball of blackness, then all of a sudden something comes out of it. You're not really prepared for it."

Heavy rain onto construction sites intrigues fossil hunters. Earth movers dig up fossils; rainwater erodes the fresh dirt, exposing the fossils.

In the late 1990s, the Searles paid a visit to Seina's mother, who was hospitalized at Mease Countryside Hospital in Safety Harbor. Rain had fallen. A new retention pond was under construction next to the parking lot.

Michael stepped into a dirt driveway and found a scraping blade, crafted by a prehistoric Floridian. After Seina returned from the hospital room, they found a 5-inch tooth of a giant shark, at least 5-million years old.

They returned after another rainy day, but a worker ordered them away.

Michael Searle and friend Patrick McGirk were staffing a Fossil Club booth at an artifacts show. They had dived together three months earlier and spent the show matching fragments from the dive.

"All of a sudden, one of his halves matches up perfectly with one of my halves, and it's a knife blade 5 inches long," McGirk said. "It's an incredible artifact . . . It's hard to find a piece of material that doesn't have a defect every 4 inches."

Curiously, the two halves of the blade were different colors. And there was a defect in the stone, right at the point the blade broke, McGirk said.

His theory: A prehistoric man was finishing his blade when he struck the defect. The blade broke away. The exasperated man, with a half-blade still in his hand, flung it into the river. Thousands of years in the two environments caused the two pieces to color differently.

"I have never glued it back together," McGirk said. "I like telling the story."

[Last modified March 10, 2005, 09:33:10]