Questions about Fossils I saw as a kid?

Question

I grew up in Kentucky and just up the road from my place was a small pond that had been dug out of a hillside. I used to sit there and fish while playing with sea shells and bones I would find. The ground was littered with these shells and bones. I once filled a shoe box with them but was told they were old rat bones and to throw them away. Now I realize they were fossils of animals that must have been living there at the time Kentucky was covered by ocean. Is this worth looking into or is places like this very common?

Answer 1

Most of Kentucky is underlain by marine sedimentary rocks, often containing fossils. There are an abundance of fossilized marine shells of many different ages across the state, but bone material is particularly rare. I would encourage you to return to the place you remember and see what you can find. You'll be able to tell the difference between modern "rat" bones and fossil bones by their appearance and weight. Modern bones will likely be white to tan in color and lightweight. Fossil bones tend to be dark brown to black, heavier in weight, and stronger. If you are in an area of Mississippian age rocks, you may have also been picking up sea urchin spines, easily misidentified as limb bones of small rodents because they are often white, thin, hollow rods about 1 to 2 inches in length. If you believe you have found fossilized bones, I would recommend that you show the bones to someone at the Kentucky Geologic Survey, a Kentucky museum, or a professor in a geology department at a university. You should go back and explore the place a little further to see what you can find today.

Answer 2

There are also shells (clam shells on top of mount everest) `check this link.

http://www.evolutionfairytale.com/forum/...

Answer 3

Is that the quarry where Colonel Sanders digs up the bones he fries in batter to sell to the unsuspecting masses?

Answer 4

To even begin to answer that, you'd have to try to find somebody who knows something about that particular area.  If a locality was yielding lots of what could be termed "old rat bones", then it would be rather odd if that dated from a time when the place was covered by the ocean.  It's actually not entirely impossible to find localities with terrestrial critters that did build up under the sea in coastal areas, but it'd be unusual.

Without knowing any further details about stuff like the age, the fossils that were there and so on, I can't possibly guess whether its a common sort of site.  However, well known fossil localities also be worth looking more into, as it's interesting and something new can always turn up.