♪ ♪ (Beryl) There's something magical about a river that seems to deny the passage of time.

With a great river like the Great Pee Dee and just a little imagination, you can be transported to any time and any place.

We'll do a little bit of that transportation in this show at Burches Ferry.

I'm Beryl Dakers and with me, my comrade in adventure, Rudy Mancke, the Curator of Natural History for the South Carolina Museum Commission.

(Rudy) Beryl, we've picked a cool day.

We're standing on a point overlooking the Great Pee Dee River, and that wind is coming up, and I guess it makes you chilly like it does me.

(Beryl) You could say that.

(Rudy) We are going to have an adventure today.

We might look at a few things before having our adventure back in time that are living today, but we're going to look at some fossils today that are extremely exciting and that makes Burches Ferry one fossil locality that's known worldwide, even though many, many people in South Carolina have never heard of it.

Scientists even across the Atlantic Ocean have heard of this area, and actually have specimens that were collected here.

We'll talk about the fossils a little bit, but it might be good to start off looking at the river for a moment and see if there's anything here today that might be worth looking at before we go down on the bluff and take a look at the fossil.

Do you see the little lizard?

(Beryl) There's somebody who's about as cold as I am.

(Rudy) Yeah.

Talking about an ancestry, that animal really has quite an ancestry back in time.

We'll be talking about the ancestry of certain organisms here today.

Sitting in the sun, trying to warm up just like we're trying to do.

Pretty dark in color, as you see.

(Beryl) Is that the variety that's usually green?

(Rudy) This is the one that often gets green, and the common name for that animal is the green anole, but the temperature and his emotional ups and downs have some effect on the colors.

[water splashing] Fish splashing in the water.

Did you hear that?

(Beryl) Doesn't he know it's cold out here?

(Rudy) There's a lot of action out here today.

There's one thing we might want to look at before we start down the hill.

Yes, that's what I thought it was.

Look at this.

This is what I thought it was from a distance.

It's a chrysalis, and what comes out of a chrysalis?

(Beryl) A butterfly and things of that sort.

(Rudy) Okay, a butterfly.

This is a butterfly chrysalis.

It's a chrysalis of a butterfly we have seen commonly on "NatureScene."

The buckeye butterfly, you remember the beautiful adult.

This is a chrysalis of that animal, and it happens to be attached, as it most often is, to a food plant.

This plant is known generally as Gerardia , and it usually has purplish flowers on it.

As you see now, they're gone.

The caterpillar feeds on the leaves of this plant, and then forms this chrysalis, and the magical changes from caterpillar to butterfly occur inside that fairly flimsy structure.

This is a strong wind, and it hasn't blown it off yet.

I noticed actually a couple of other pieces of chrysalises on the Gerardia .

Very, very interesting.

We were talking about fossils.

We're going to look at those today.

Things like this don't become fossilized.

(Beryl) Why is that?

(Rudy) They're just too lightweight.

They're too easily damaged.

We want to talk about how these fossils formed because that's something that's interesting, but flimsy things like this are very rarely fossilized.

See that little clump?

Just stand back from that a little bit, and you can get a feeling for the clump of Gerardia .

You often see this plant growing in masses like this.

Look at that little chrysalis.

Why don't we move on down toward the trail and look at some fossils.

(Beryl) Okay.

(Rudy) There are other things that I like.

I think they're pretty this time of the year.

It's a great time of the year if you're interested in making dried arrangements with the more common plants.

There are a lot of things you can use.

One of my favorites is just simply one of these composites.

Remember this one, probably had yellowish-colored flowers and heads on the top, and this would be the fruit, which has fuzzy ends on it.

When you pull that fruit off and you pull out a magnifying glass and take a look at them, you really can get a good feeling for the seed that are attached at the bottom there.

They have little fuzzy tops.

Take a look.

Those things blow them around in the wind.

(Beryl) And make sure we have more.

(Rudy) Yeah, and scatter them.

The breeze now probably will scatter this thing on the other side of the county.

[howling wind] Very, very interesting way to disburse seed, and that's going on right now.

Seed are not often found as fossils because they're very -- (Beryl) They're too light.

(Rudy) -- easily damaged.

It's the hard parts of plants and animals that are fossilized.

Although, those seed are fairly hard.

Look at those things.

(Beryl) There they go.

(Rudy) Blowing off in the breeze.

Why don't we head on down toward the trail here.

(Rudy) One of the things that bothers me every time I see it, Beryl, is trash.

(Beryl) Well, it tells you that another creature has been here.

(Rudy) It's the sign of a human, and I hate that.

I can think of better ways to leave our signatures behind.

Here's a signature that an animal left behind that's really neat.

We talked about this on the show a long time ago.

Look at this.

(Beryl) Somebody has bitten off a branch.

(Rudy) Let's just see.

We should be able to find -- there it is.

(Rudy) It's a hickory tree.

See?

(Beryl) Aha.

(Rudy) Used to be sitting in about that position.

Do you know the story behind what went on here?

(Beryl) Slightly, but you can tell us again to remind us.

(Rudy) This is the sign that a twig-girdler beetle has been at work.

It's named that because it girdles the twig, snips it all the way around, leaving just the inner part, the pith, which is not strong enough in the stiff wind to hold it all.

What she does this for is simply this: She lays eggs out here before she snips it, and then she girdles the twig, and the wind blows, and this thing actually falls down to the ground where it can develop a little more safely than it can up here, because there are a whole lot of predators that are just waiting in the wintertime for a free meal.

They could drill in here and eat these things, like woodpeckers for instance, but with it down on the ground, it's out of being exposed.

It's not exposed anymore.

It's not obvious.

It's out of sight.

(Beryl) A little more protection.

(Rudy) The beetle larva develop inside.

There's plenty of food there to get them through the winter.

Usually, when this occurs is in August of the year, and then the beetle dies, and the young overwinters, those eggs and larva, on the ground.

Neat little signatures.

(Beryl) Oh, nature has so many amazing ways of preserving life.

(Rudy) Fossils in a way are like signatures.

They tell us about an animal that isn't here anymore.

Let's head down the trail and see if we can't find some fossils at Burches Ferry.

(Beryl) I have a question.

(Rudy) Yeah.

(Beryl) How do we know about those forms of life that don't leave fossils behind?

(Rudy) Well, the answer -- and this is something I think we need to remind ourselves of -- is we don't.

In other words, if there has not been a fossil found of a form, we don't know that form existed.

One of the things we need to keep in mind when we talk about fossils is we know very little.

One paleontologist, fossil collector, said that when you deal with fossils, it's like trying to put together a -- [jet turbines whirring] (Rudy) -- there's a jet airplane behind me, listen -- trying to put together a puzzle when you've only got three or four pieces of the puzzle, and you have no idea what the puzzle is supposed to look like.

We really have a lot to learn, and one of the places that's very exciting is Burches Ferry because we've learned a lot here.

Not everything but we've learned a tremendous amount about South Carolina millions of years ago, back when, believe it or not, an ocean was covering this area of the state.

(Beryl) Let's go find some evidence of that.

(Rudy) All right, good.

[rustling leaves] (Rudy) Be careful on these leaves.

Probably this was the trail that was used, and it was probably a little wider, to get to the old ferry crossing here.

One of the real problems was getting across rivers like this.

Just be easy.

And that's what gives Burches Ferry its name.

Now, look at this, Beryl.

We begin to see outcrops of rock, and we're on the coastal plain in South Carolina.

Most of the time you think of the piedmont as having a lot of rock outcrops, but if you look at the rocks up there, they're either metamorphic rocks or some igneous rocks.

This is sedimentary rock, and what's neat about sedimentary rock is, when it forms -- and it forms from bits and pieces of other rock that eventually get naturally cemented together -- guess what it traps?

It traps bodies, or parts of bodies, of plants and animals and makes them a part of the rock, and, of course, those are fossils.

Fossils are just remains of plants and animals that died far back in the past and are preserved in the earth.

(Beryl) Let's look and see if we can find any.

(Rudy) We should be able to find some here, and there is something right there we need to look at right off.

This is one of the fossils we came to see, Beryl, a very exciting one found here at Burches Ferry.

This thing right here is really, believe it or not, an internal shell of a squid-like animal that was swimming around in an ocean.

They seem to be very common here because we've found a lot of these internal shells here.

They're called belemnites, b-e-l-e-m-n-i-t-e, belemnites.

These are one of the fossils that are actually considered to be index fossils.

(Beryl) Index fossils?

(Rudy) Yeah, index fossils.

(Beryl) What do we mean by that?

(Rudy) Index of a book kind of tells you where something is in the pages, right?

(Beryl) This pinpoints us historically?

(Rudy) This pinpoints us in time.

Index fossils are fossils that generally tell us that a specific time is represented here.

(Beryl) What do we know about this particular fossil?

(Rudy) We know that this lived in oceans, so we know that the material around this fossil is basically old ocean floor.

Do you remember on another show we talked about the was-ness of the is?

Here's the way it is.

It tells us about how it was.

That one fossil would be enough to talk about the fact that an ocean was here.

I think we'll be able to find more fossils.

This is hard to see.

Can you see this little spirally feeling right here?

(Beryl) It looks like a shell is embedded there.

(Rudy) That is a cast of a snail, one of the marine snails that was living here, and you can almost get a feeling for the spiral there, and that is a good sign that the ocean was once here.

(Beryl) How long ago are we talking about, Rudy?

(Rudy) The people who study this area and others put dates like 65 to 80 million years ago.

(Beryl) That's incredible.

(Rudy) Upper Cretaceous time is what it was called, but that's a long time ago.

(Beryl) This was all water?

(Rudy) This was under water.

This was old ocean floor, and now it's exposed.

One of the great things this river has done is exposed this area so we can look at it, and it kind of chopped through the layers of rock and gives us a very good feeling of time.

There are lots of places in South Carolina where you can go to find fossils, but what I like about Burches Ferry is you can actually see materials stacked up on more material and get a feeling for time.

It's almost like pages in a book, and these index fossils help you find which page you're on in the book of time.

That's what's very exciting about this area.

We'll see that in a minute.

There's one other thing I want to show you before we go, and this is one of those plants in South Carolina that are poisonous that we need to tell people about.

What does that fruit resemble to you?

(Beryl) Well, it looks rather like an unripe tomato.

(Rudy) It's in the same family with tomatoes, and most of the plants in that family happen to be poisonous, and this is one of the poisonous ones known as nightshade, or some people refer to it as deadly nightshade.

The leaves are off now, and the fruit is here.

It's not tempting to an adult to eat.

(Beryl) But I bet the color is very attractive to children.

(Rudy) Kids see it very quickly.

This is a plant that's not only found at Burches Ferry, but it's scattered around the state and does very well in big cities, especially vacant lots.

It's good to know that poisonous plant.

We don't have too many of them, but we've got enough to be careful, and that's one to leave alone.

It's best not to put anything in your mouth and feed on it unless you're absolutely sure of what you're dealing with.

(Beryl) Uh-hmm.

Look at that river.

(Rudy) Look at the edge of the river.

You see those tracks?

(Beryl) I do.

(Rudy) I only thought there was one series, but there are actually two series.

The big tracks there are bird tracks, great blue heron.

(Beryl) How can you tell just from looking at the tracks?

(Rudy) The size is all there is to it, and the shape a little bit, but the great blue heron is our big wading bird, and you see the river has dropped down a great deal now.

When the river was in, the great blue heron was hunting here.

After the river went down a little further, you can see raccoon tracks running along beside the great blue heron tracks, and so the river must have dropped.

See how muddy it is along the edge?

It probably dropped a good number of feet in the past few days.

There's a power plant up the way, I think, that does regulate the flow of water in the river.

Let's see if we can find some fossils.

(Beryl) Okay, some good ones.

(Rudy) Uh-huh.

♪ ♪ (Rudy) It's real slippery down here.

Be careful.

(Beryl) It is.

(Rudy) Hold up just a second.

Let me get this knife blade open.

I want to show you a really nice belemnite.

See it right down here?

(Beryl) Oh, yes.

(Rudy) Apply a little pressure here, and I think we can roll that out.

Let's look at this and see if we can figure out how it fits in the body of a squid, because squid today have internal shells.

They're called pins, and this is just an internal shell that's made out of harder material, probably calcium carbonate, which is very abundant in the oceans.

The squid sort of fits this way.

The tentacles of the squid would be at this end of the belemnite, and his eye, and then this would be the back end of the squid here, and usually he jet propels himself backwards.

This little internal shell acts as a little bit of ballast, sort of stabilizes the rear end of the squid, and also protects the vital organs, which are in the front part of the body, from damage in case he runs into something.

They're very hard, and we've said already that fossils are generally hard parts of plants or animals that are left behind.

(Beryl) With so many of those around, why don't we see more squid in the waters around here?

(Rudy) Well, in oceans today, if you take a net and do some seining, you're going to catch squid.

Instead of having hard, internal shells, they'll have that pliable pin, but they're built the same way.

Basically, they're built the same way, and this is a very interesting remain because fossils like this do tell us that the ocean was here, even though there's not a lot of evidence it was here, except for the fossils and a little bit of the rock that we've already taken a look at.

Why don't you hold on to that one.

This may be a good place.

A lot of the material now is being eroded out of this hill by the action of the Pee Dee River.

(Beryl) Look at that shell-like stuff down there.

(Rudy) Look at this.

Yeah, this is really nice here.

That is another one of those index fossils, Beryl.

It's one of the extinct oysters.

This one is known as Exogyra .

(Beryl) Exogyra .

(Rudy) Remember, we were talking about index fossils.

(Beryl) Rudy, what makes a fossil an index fossil or not?

(Rudy) All right, Beryl.

It's a combination of factors.

It has to be an animal or a plant species that was really common.

That's important.

It also has to be a plant or animal species that didn't really live for a long period of time, geological time.

(Beryl) You mean it had a finite period of existence?

(Rudy) Yeah, usually reasonably short.

We feel like we know pretty well the age length, or the life span, of that species.

The other thing that is nice, if you can have it, is that its range would be a pretty reasonable size, so it would be useful to you wherever you were.

This variety of oyster that's now extinct -- we don't find them living in ocean waters anymore -- is an index fossil because it has those three characteristics, and this is one of the perfect places.

This one says Upper Cretaceous, same as the belemnites, and as a matter of fact, when I went down for that... (Beryl) Oh, there are more belemnites.

(Rudy) There are at least two, and you see how beautiful those things are really once they are eroded away.

The exciting thing about fossils to me when I find them is that I'm the first human to ever touch these things.

Probably they hadn't even seen the light of day for a long period of time because they were buried on the bottom of an ocean.

Then the river here has eroded them out of that burial ground, and it's sort of an overcast day today and a little cloudy this morning, and that's a perfect kind of feeling when you come to exhume the bodies of organisms, living things, that lived way back in time.

(Beryl) Let's see if there's anything else down there.

(Rudy) There's a whole pile of stuff.

This one is kind of an interesting thing.

You see that?

(Beryl) Oh, there's a shell imprint.

(Rudy) Exactly.

That's just as much of a fossil as the actual shell.

A lot of times people think of fossils as just being the actual parts of animals, but an imprint is a fossil, also, and this is probably a fossil of a marine snail called Turritella , and they were very, very common, again with the spiraling shell.

I think you can see that pretty distinctively.

It was pressed into the rock as it formed.

This is a piece of sedimentary rock, kind of nice material.

One of the things we might want to do, getting back in the present, is to look out over the Pee Dee River.

I think you can see today that it is very low, and since it's low, you can see a couple of things that it's doing to the land around here.

First is, it seems to be depositing sand.

You see that forming a little -- (Beryl) I see the sandbar.

(Rudy) -- sandbar, and notice the trees that come rushing out to the sandbars, it seems.

The willows, and these willows will stabilize that sandbar, and more material will be added, and eventually that will be more forest like the forest on the far side of the river.

(Beryl) Can we assume that the river is depositing more sand on the bottom as it goes along?

(Rudy) Not so much on the bottom, but the sides.

(Beryl) Just the sides?

(Rudy) Right, the sides seem to be where the material is deposited.

If you look in the distance, you see that it's curving this way, and that's the inside of the curve there.

That's usually where it deposits sand.

It's eroding away on the outside of the curve.

Look and see what's happened to those trees.

They've had the ground -- (Beryl) Taken out from under them.

(Rudy) -- taken out from under them, and they've collapsed in, and that's the way a river works.

It continues to shift back and forth, and forms a floodplain.

Remember the floodplains that we talked about before?

(Beryl) I do.

That doesn't make me feel very sturdy about standing here.

(Rudy) Well, you see, we're not by the edge.

This river is changing the world.

We've said that many times, that this place has changed.

An ocean was once here, and where was the river then?

Well, it was nothing.

You know, this is a fairly young river compared to rivers in the upper part of the state.

The ocean has never covered them, at least not in recent times, but in fairly recent times the ocean has covered this area, and now the river has come back.

(Beryl) What do you mean by recent times?

(Rudy) Well, when you speak in geological terms, recent means -- (Beryl) Hundreds of years, maybe.

(Rudy) -- ten million, twenty million.

(Beryl) Millions of years.

(Rudy) Yeah.

One of the things that's so hard to believe sometimes is the age of the earth and how it's continued to change over a long period of time, and how we sort of read the clues and figured out some of this.

It's tough, and we said at the start that we don't have all the information yet, we're still learning.

(Beryl) No, we've just uncovered a couple animals that tell us a little bit.

(Rudy) Why don't I head out, just follow me, and let's look and see if we see some of these layers that I talked about earlier.

(Beryl) Okay.

I may need a helping hand.

(Rudy) I'll give it to you.

It's a little slippery.

Just be careful.

(Beryl) Okay.

♪ (Beryl) There's all sorts of stuff here.

I don't know what's good and what isn't.

(Rudy) There's some crazy -- oh, that's nice.

(Beryl) Is that a bone?

(Rudy) Sure, uh-huh.

This is really a piece of soft-shelled turtle shell.

(Beryl) That's turtle?

(Rudy) Uh-huh.

You can maybe get a feeling for that little pitted area there.

That's pretty nice because it's trapped a little bit of dirt in the bottom of the pits.

We, of course, have soft-shelled turtles today, and there are soft-shelled turtles living in this river, but this is one of the extinct varieties.

One of the ways you tell the difference between just modern-day bone and fossil, fossilized bone, is to notice that fossilized bone is heavier in weight than normal bone is, and it's usually darker in color, not always but usually darker in color, kind of like this.

Again, it's probably absorbed quite a few minerals from the river and from the material that it was buried in, and that's very important.

It seems for something to become fossilized -- flimsy pieces of an animal or plant don't ever make it, but if you can cover the material pretty quickly, you might actually get fossils of leaves and things even that delicate.

But covering it quickly and having a lot of minerals dissolved in water available to it... (Beryl) That makes a difference.

(Rudy) That really makes a difference.

Along the floodplain, like this river has now, is a pretty good place for a plant or animal to become fossilized.

(Beryl) I bet there's stuff embedded in that rock.

(Rudy) Well, look at that.

You see, there's a massive amount of material, and this is called the Pee Dee Sand.

It's very sandy material.

You can almost -- let me see if I can't crumble it in my hands.

You know, you just take a piece of it -- (Beryl) It looks so sturdy.

(Rudy) -- yeah, and crumble it up, and it's weathering away.

The wind, every time it blows down here, does cause bits of it to flake off.

Ice can form underneath here and cause this to fall off.

So when I come to this place, I don't really have to do any excavating.

Nature has done that for us, and that's why this is a very, very special site, but the Pee Dee Sand gets its name from what, do you think?

The river.

(Beryl) Oh, of course.

(Rudy) This is a site on the Pee Dee River.

It's a pile of sandy material here, Pee Dee Sand.

Again, this is trapped.

This was formed a long time ago under an ocean situation, trapped this turtle and lots of other things and made them become fossils, and that's awfully nice.

(Beryl) Then they just come out.

(Rudy) Let's see what we can see further on.

(Beryl) Okay.

(Rudy) Just keep looking as we walk.

Maybe we can find a couple of things.

I see an interesting tooth here, and another large oyster shell.

You got anything?

(Beryl) I think both of these are teeth of some sort, but I don't know what they are.

(Rudy) We've been kind of lucky today with teeth.

I don't usually find that much, but the water is down a little bit more today than usual.

Maybe that is what's going on here.

(Beryl) Look at that.

(Rudy) This is a perfect place to stop and talk about what we're looking at here.

You remember we were talking about the fact that the record of life in the past is kind of like pages in a book?

Well, you can see this is a good, thick page up top, and then another kind of chapter here below.

(Beryl) It looks like a lot of pages down there.

(Rudy) It's like two chapters in a book.

The upper part, the upper mass of material, is the same old Pee Dee Sand that we were playing with back there just a few moments ago.

Then there's a fairly distinct line, and then there's some clayey material.

(Beryl) That's stratification, isn't it?

(Rudy) Stratification, layering in the rocks, and it was first really looked at, and the fossils that were found in these layers analyzed, by a fellow with a common name, William Smith, in England.

He was the one that first realized that these layers really have some information for us.

I like to think of them as pages in a book.

We don't know how to read all the pages, but we're putting the pieces together, and it's a very, very exciting story.

(Beryl) It sure is.

Please tell me what these things are.

(Rudy) This is that oyster shell again.

We've seen that.

(Beryl) Look at that!

(Rudy) This is really neat.

You don't find these often here.

It's the tooth of one of the crocodiles.

(Beryl) A crocodile?

(Rudy) Yeah, a pretty large one by the size of the tooth.

You have something else.

(Beryl) I have another tooth that's longer.

(Rudy) This one is really, really neat.

Looks almost like roots on the base of it.

Nice thick enamel there.

This is a tooth from the sawfish.

You know sawfish has a long bill, and these teeth are along the sides, and that's what that is.

I even found -- (Beryl) A shark's tooth.

(Rudy) -- a single shark's tooth, one known as Squalicorax , typical of that age.

These things are more exciting when you know what they are.

(Beryl) That's the key, because I walk along and find fossils, but it doesn't do anything because I don't know what I'm looking at.

(Rudy) That's one of the things we can do for the people who watch.

We can encourage them to go to a place and find this material, and we can let them know what they've got sometimes, and that's part of the fun.

Going back in time can be extremely exciting, if you know what you're looking at.

(Beryl) Realizing that we are part of a long history here.

(Rudy) That makes life more interesting, doesn't it?

(Beryl) It sure does.

We hope you've enjoyed this edition of "NatureScene."

Join us again for the next look at South Carolina's bountiful nature.

I want to find some more fossils to take back.

(Rudy) Yeah, I can't leave before I get more than this.

(Beryl) Okay, watch your step.

(Rudy) Okay.

♪ Program captioned by: CompuScripts Captioning, Inc. 803.988.8438 ♪