Geology & Fossils
Although North Carolina and neighboring South Carolina are Coastal Plain states, they boast some of the oldest fossils in the world. That is because the Appalachians pass through the states. Most of the Paleozoic Era rocks in the the mountains are igneous (volcanic) or metamorphic. Few fossils have been found here.
However, there is a region in the Piedmont that has produced some very special fossils. Known as the Carolina Slate Belt, it contains fossils that date to the Eocambrian in North Carolina. What is the Eocambrian? It is the youngest period of the Precambrian Era, dating back 620 million years! These are the rocks that harbor fossils of Pteridinium carolinaense.
Triassic Basins
In the eastern Piedmont of North Carolina are a series of basins that were formed near the beginning of the Mesozoic Era — the Age of Dinosaurs. These basins contain fossils of animals that lived some 210 million years ago.
These Triassic fossils include fishes, amphibians, crocodile-like animals called phytosaurs, mammal-like reptiles, and dinosaurs. North Carolina’s Mesozoic basins include some of North America’s most famous insect fossils. These include aquatic and forest insects such as water bugs, crane flies, March flies, and beetles.
Finally, these basins are also famous for their fossils of Triassic plants. There are horsetails, ferns and related plants, conifers (or evergreen trees), and plants with such strange names as cycads and cycadeoids.
The Carolinas are not a good place to search for fossils from the second period of the age of dinosaurs — the Jurassic. Fossils from the last period, the Cretaceous, are found in the Coastal Plain however. Late Cretaceous fossils include marine invertebrates, sharks, bony fishes, aquatic turtles, crocodiles, marine lizards, rare dinosaurs, and plants.
Cenozoic Dinosaurs?
Not only is the “Terror of the South” is coming home to North Carolina, but a new “terror lizard” has just been discovered within a few miles of the Research Triangle.
In 1999, a one-ton, ten-foot-long rauisuchian — an ancestor of the dinosaurs — was discovered in South Carolina.
This creature lived some 221 million years ago. Its remains were found in the Durham-Sanford Basin, one of a series of similar basins stretching from New Jersey to South Carolina. Rauisuchians were the top predators of their time. Unlike the later Tyrannosaurs, they walked on all fours, like giant lizards.
One of the most fearsome predators North Carolina has ever known was Acrocanthosaurus, a meat-eating dinosaur that lived about 112 million years ago during the early Cretaceous Period. It stood about 13 feet tall, just a little less than Tyrannosaurus, which evolved later in the Cretaceous.
Acrocanthosaurus fossils have been found on the coastal plain from Texas to Maryland. So it’s assumed that it also inhabited what is now North Carolina. However, many of the places where one might expect to find its bones are now underwater.
Fossils of three other Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 25-30 million years later than Acrocanthosaurus have been found in the Black Creek Formation in Bladen County, North Carolina. They are Hypsibema (a hadrosuaur, or duck-billed dinosaur), Ornithomimus, a(an ostrich-like coelurosaur, and Dryptosaurus (a medium-sized predator).
The Age of Mammals
But most Coastal Plain fossils represent the Era in which we live, the Cenozic. The best known Coastal Plain fossils in the Carolinas are mollusks — snails and bivalves. There are a great variety of marine invertebrates however. Vertebrate fossils include the bones of birds, turtles, and whales and the teeth of sharks, horses, and elephants. There are also plant fossils.
Fossils of the Carolinas offer evidence that the Coastal Plain is always changing. Most Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, and Miocene fossils are of marine animals. Younger Pliocene and Pleistocene fossils represent both marine and land animals. (Shark teeth and whale bones are abundant here.) Late Pleistocene fossils are mostly marine.
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