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)
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)