Fossils

Fossils are rare on some beaches, but I thought that I should show you how to identify them if you do find some.

This is a piece of a turtle shell, I think that it is a piece of soft shelled turtle shell because it is not completely hard.

These are puffer fish teeth. They are layered unlike most other teeth you might find on the beach.

These are some of my favorite fossils, stingray barbs. The one on top is not completely fossilized and is more fragile than the fully fossilized one.

These are horse teeth. They are bigger than the other fossils that I have already posted about.

These are stingray mouth plates. They are very common on some beaches.

I hope to get more of my fossils identified soon.

Red Tide

Recently, Florida's west coast has been experiencing red tide. Yesterday I went to Lido with my mom and we walked all the way down to a wall that we walk down to. At the wall, there was lots of dead fish on the sand. It smelled bad and red tide makes it hard to breath. The red tide didn't seem to be effecting the seabirds too much, but we were only seeing the birds that were close to shore and not the ones farther out. There were also lots of olive snails stranded near the water. We put all that we could find back in the water. We did not find many good shells that day, or much trash.

Coquinas

These are Donax variabilis, or coquinas. They are bivalves, like scallops, and oysters. They come in many colors like purple, yellow, brown, pink, and lots more. They are very common in Florida. The top photo is of connected coquinas. The second photo is of disconnected coquinas. The third is of a coquina I found in my jar of coquinas. It looks like it has a question mark on it. I have seen hundreds of live coquinas trying to get under the sand before another wave hits them sometimes, and birds get the coquinas when they can.