A few days after reading an article in The SandPaper about the search for a 500,000-year-old petrified crab, found on the beaches of Long Beach Island and taken to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia 50 years ago, Peter Chirico, a seasonal Loveladies resident from West Virginia, said he, too, happened upon what he believed was a fossilized crab.
“I read the article, and sure enough I was walking on the beach in Loveladies when I saw this unusual, 3- to 4-inch, brown rock. I picked it up and thought, ‘Oh, my god, it’s a crab shell,’” Chirico said with a laugh.
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| Photo by Jack Reynolds |
It was a weekday morning, around 8 or 9 o’clock, when Chirico was walking along the beach, perusing the sand for sea glass and shells, and the object caught his eye.
“Most of the bottom is knocked out of it, but you can even see the surface of the shell and the ridges around the periphery of the anterior aspects of it. It’s definitely a crab fossil. I have no doubt that that’s what this is,” he said.
Chirico has been visiting the Island since 1958, when he was a kid, and many of his relatives had houses in Beach Haven West. His parents, Anthony and Catherine Chirico, bought a summer home on the mainland in 1971. After landing a job, moving to West Virginia with his wife and kids, and paying off his student loans, Chirico decided to purchase his own summer house in Loveladies.
“It was either come back to New Jersey, go to Myrtle Beach, which many people do, or go to Hilton Head, which a lot of people do, too,” he said. “We chose to come back to our roots, to come back to New Jersey. We’re the second generation in the family to migrate to Long Beach Island, and it’s the best investment we’ve ever made. It’s a second home,” he added.
Chirico has since spent many summers sifting through the sand. Although he has come upon many different items, such as broken pieces of chinaware and metal, most likely from old shipwrecks, he said he had not happened upon anything quite like the crab-shaped specimen before.
“It’s a nice, little novelty, and I’m sure people have been walking past these ever since they started dredging for the beach. It’s in a nice, little bowl of seashells in my house. It makes a great item for discussion,” he remarked.
“Some of the people I showed it to didn’t think it was a big deal, but for someone like me who’s always been interested in paleontology, to find something like this is kind of a neat, little turn of events,” he added.
On a quest to find out more about the piece, The SandPaper turned to the New Jersey State Museum, which was established in 1985 by the state Legislature to collect and display natural history, archaeology and industrial history specimens associated with and found within the state.
David Parris, curator of natural history at the museum, said crab fossils in concretions are regularly found along the shore, especially from Long Beach Island and farther south, such as in Brigantine. The museum receives inquiries about a specimen every year or two.
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| Photo by Jack Reynolds |
“Many look much like the pictures you sent to me, which seemed to have a few intact features of claw and tail remaining,” said Parris, referring to Chirico’s find from the beach. “Some are actually spectacularly preserved, with the entire outline of the carapace and claws readily observed, and such specimens may be 6 or 7 inches in maximum length,” he added.
According to Parris, these types of fossils are from the Ice Age, and many shore area fossils of that age are about 10,000 to 12,000 years old. The unit of sediments, called the Cape May Formation by most geologists, was formed from deposits along the shore. Portions of the sediment are churned up by storms and beach dredging, and often wash ashore.
Concretions usually form in a burrow or depression, which is just where you expect to find a crab, Parris explained. Although they are not particularly rare, he said they are very fascinating, especially because the concretionary fossils are often from the same species as the blue crab. Bones and teeth of Ice Age mammals such as mastodons, mammoths, ground sloths, walruses and whales are also known to wash ashore.
“Scallop dredgers and clam boatmen often find the fossils, so some families have collections of their own. New Jersey has a remarkable fossil record for many different forms of fossils and ages of rocks and sediments. Long Beach Island is particularly known for fossil finds,” said Parris.
For more information about the New Jersey State Museum, visit http://nj.gov/state/museum/index.html.
This article was published in The SandPaper.
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