>While looking carefully in the pebble/shell/vegetation rubble,
often at the high tide line, I have occasionally come across
exquisite fossils. Most have been crinoids and  coral. My two
prize finds are brachiopods. These specimens are rock-hard, nothing
like the chalky specimens from the Calvert Cliffs area in Maryland.
 
Shireen Gonzaga's fossils sound Paleozoic, but Delaware has no Paleozoic
rocks at the surface. I suspect that you have been collecting fossils from
the "Riprap Formation"--a joke name for Paleozoic limestone that is
quarried in blocks and laid down to protect riverbanks and beaches from
erosion. This is called "riprap" and it often does yield some very nice
things. The problem is to identify where the riprap was originally
quarried, which is a question that only people on the spot can answer. Rock
being heavy and expensive to transport, it usually isn't far.* The folks at
the Delaware Geological Survey might be able to answer this, but then again
they might not. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Their address is:
Delaware Geological Survey, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716-7501;
telephone (302) 831-2833.
 
Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama
 
*An interesting exception to this general rule is the rock used as ship
ballast up to fairly recent times. Ships are designed to handle best while
filled with cargo. If no cargo were available, rocks were often used; now
water is the usual ballast. Over the decades, enough discarded ballast
accumulated in some harbors to extend the shoreline, as in Mobile, Alabama,
and Pensacola, Florida. Ballast rocks from England are not at all uncommon
there.
 
Incidentally, the use of water as ballast has had disastrous consequences
for estuaries all over the world. When a ship dumps rocks, nothing much
happens. But water, which can contain all sorts of living creatures, is
quite another matter. Chiefly as a result of unintended introductions, San
Francisco Bay, California, has practically no native ecology left. The
Black Sea's fisheries have been depleted by the introduction of a common
Atlantic comb jelly (ctenophore, genus Mnemiopsis) that eats fish larvae.
Eastern North America's waterways are currently being devastated by the
introduction of the zebra mussel, which is native to the Black Sea and
arrived in ballast water. And so on. But I digress...
 
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