A fossil beach is an ancient beach which is preserved in fossil form due to a change in sea level or a shift in elevation which causes the beach to become an elevated terrace.
Fossil beaches may be discovered where a limestone quarry or strip mining operation is present. For example, Miami has numerous fossil beaches which have been exposed by limestone mining. A famous example is the Pinecrest beds — a fossil-bearing rock formation found in the south of the city which is a segment of a much larger geological formation — the Tamiami Formation.
Fossil specimens found at a fossil beach vary according to the age of the bedrock or the sea floor matrix and the type of prehistoric environment that was present at the location. In southwest England, Jurassic ammonites are found. In South Florida, Miocene shells and marine animals are found such as the teeth of the extinct Megalodon shark.
Famous quotes containing the words fossil and/or beach:
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The seashore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-traveled and untamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)