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Lost in the hunt
Skye Basak of Palmetto Fossil Excursions has her eyes on the prize, a nearly pristine fossilized shark tooth recovered from a sand pit in Dorchester County.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Buried treasure
Dani and Kevin Stansell and their children Emma Grace and Jackson, from Raleigh, dig for fossils with help from guide Matthew Basak, second from right.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Cha-ching!
Writer Hastings Hensel displays his find of the day—a four-inch megalodon shark tooth.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Another day at the office
Josh and Skye Basak guide their guests on fossil hunting trips to a 100-acre sand pit they lease near Dorchester.
Photo by Mic Smith
Once upon a few million years ago, this spot in Dorchester County was the ocean floor. Try to imagine it: where the pine trees stand on the high ground today, a huge river spilled into the sea. Instead of buzzards and hawks flying through the air, leviathan sharks—as long and large as semitrailers—swam through dark waters, hunting baleen whales.
Picture the most colossal of these monsters, the megalodon: 80,000 pounds of cold-blooded torpedoing mass, chomping down on its prey with a mouth of nearly 300 teeth. And then imagine how, at one quick instance, a single tooth falls out of the shark’s mouth and drifts silently down through the water, landing in the sand of the ocean floor.
Now imagine time speeding up. Eons of hurricanes stack up layers of sediment. The land gets higher, the tooth gets deeper. And then one day, just a mere 20 years ago, a mining company’s excavators—looking almost like dinosaurs themselves—scrape off the earth’s upper layers, gathering construction material.
Now imagine that you, on a fine morning in the 21st century, have signed up for a dig with Palmetto Fossil Excursions, who lease this 100-acre mining pit near Dorchester to take people on fossil digs. You are dry-digging and sifting, finding pocket loads of small, fossilized treasures—mako shark’s teeth, stingray barbs, fish vertebrae, whale bones—when suddenly you come upon the motherlode: a four-inch megalodon tooth, smooth and dark and almost perfectly intact.
No, this is beyond your imagination, your wildest dreams. It’s as if the tooth waited millions of years just for you, the first human to touch it.
You look toward your guide, Skye Basak, the co-founder along with her husband, Josh, of the fossil-hunting outfitter, and she tells you that you have to kiss it. You bring the shark’s tooth to your lips and revel in the thrill of the find.
“There is nothing else that will make me as happy as when I see someone find their dream tooth,” Skye says. “That’s one of the most exciting moments in life for me.”
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Skye found her first shark’s tooth on Edisto Beach when she was two years old. Two years later, she saw Jurassic Park. Her obsession with marine fossils had begun, well, to fossilize.
“Growing up, my thing was being outside,” she says. “I wanted to understand how the earth itself works. As I got older and learned more about the history of South Carolina and our coastal deposits here, I started taking a strong interest in whales and dolphins of the Oligocene epoch, which is 22 to 32.9 million years ago.”
Josh Basak found his first megalodon tooth in his twenties, while digging under a historic Charleston house for bottles. He and a friend had been pulling out bottles “left and right” before his friend cried out in astonishment. Basak thought his friend had found a valuable historic relic—a Confederate belt buckle or colonial coins—but when he saw it was a shark’s tooth, he wasn’t disappointed. He was hooked.
When Josh and Skye met in January of 2020 over a mutual love for paleontological digging, things moved fast for two people accustomed to dealing in slow time. They came up with the idea of starting a fossil-hunting excursion business in May, and they got married in November.
“One day I had to sell my best meg to pay rent,” Josh says, “and I looked at her and said, ‘There’s gotta be another way to make a living off of this.’ And she said, ‘Well, all these people are offering us money to take them hunting …”
They both had been attracting interest on Facebook, where they would post their finds to paleontological pages. They decided to lease some fossil-rich land and call their new business Palmetto Fossil Excursions.
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At first, the natural environment where you meet the Basaks for a dry dig looks like nothing special—just a big open pit, with five-foot mounds of sandy material in the corner, some wheelbarrows and a Porta-John. You grab a shovel, pick a mound, and start scraping away at the surface, feeling for resistance and listening for the sound of metal scraping against rocks and fossilized bone.
“When I dig,” Josh says, “I keep my eyes and my ears open and my feeling in the tip of my shovel. If it’s not big enough to stop my shovel, it’s not big enough to grab my interest. Basically, you’re looking for shiny rocks. If it’s a point, you might have a shark’s tooth.”
Your first finds will naturally be chunks of phosphate, which Skye will tell you is a mineral composite that forms due to the breakdown of organic tissue in fish.
“But when you see phosphate,” she says, “that’s the number one indicator you are in a location where you can find fossils. Quartz is an indicator, too, and also bone. The bigger the bone, the bigger the teeth are usually gonna be.”
It can be frustrating at first, as a newbie, to come up with shovelfuls of phosphate while the Basaks are finding and identifying seemingly everything out of nothing (“Ooh, there’s a piece of whale bone,” Skye says. “Another piece of whale bone. There’s a tooth the shark must have busted the tip off by biting into an animal.”).
But they remind you that digging takes patience, like fishing. You have to train your eye to see shapes. If the shape is abstract, it’s usually a rock; if it has symmetrical lines, it’s likely a fossil. And then, like one of those Magic Eye paintings in which the outlines become suddenly visible, you may start to see the teeth.
“And when you’re doing this as much as we are, and as long as we have,” Skye says, “I can promise you I can find a fossil sticking out of the dirt faster than I can find something dropped on my kitchen floor.”
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If dry-digging continues to prove elusive, the Basaks will take you over to “Sifting Island,” where they’ve hooked up a pump to a retention pond, and where you can hose off scoops from the dry dig and let the water wash away the dirt.
Some of their clients—a mix of Charleston-area locals and tourists—will spend eight hours a day, for three days straight, just washing. Or they will buy a box of “micro-matrix” material off of the Palmetto Fossil Excursions website to sift at home.
“When you first get into fossil hunting, the first thing you’re after is a megalodon tooth,” Skye explains. “As you progress in your fossil hunting career, you come to learn that there are rare shark species—nurse, cat, Greenland, angel shark—and you want to find those. You’ve got this group of fossil hunters in the community who’ve found all the big stuff. They want to find things that are more relevant to science.”
The Basaks would know. They’ve discovered new species, including the only walrus skull with associated tusks in the Northern Hemisphere. They’ve contributed specimens to the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History at the College of Charleston. They recently located an ancient crocodile vertebra in a pond. They study geologic maps and hike and hike. And hike some more. Sometimes they crawl along on hands and knees with microscopes. They have an amateur lab in their home, and they dream of building a professional lab in the near future.
Hardest of all, perhaps, they work with general contractors, landowners, and construction managers “to revolutionize the relationship between fossil hunters and developers.”
“Without what they do,” Skye says, referring to the fact that developers often have to dig down to the fossil bed, “a lot of these exposures wouldn’t exist.”
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At the end of the day’s dig, you may be reluctant to put down your shovel, despite the fact you’re covered in mud and sore in places you’d forgotten about. There’s always the thrill of the next find, perhaps a six-inch megalodon or even a saber-toothed tiger tooth, a discovery that will make the news and wow millions on social media.
But Skye will dig down to remind you of something else, something deeper.
“It’s honestly very therapeutic,” she says. “When you’re digging for fossils, your mind becomes numb to everything that’s going on around you. You get lost in the repetitive motion of it; you get lost in the hunt.”
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Get There
To book with Palmetto Fossil Excursions, or for more information, visit their website: palmetto-fossil-excursions.com/sifting-island-adventures or call (843) 908-0227.
For all excursions, they provide shovels, sifting tables, wagons, buckets and chisels. They encourage you to bring your own snacks, drinks, gloves, and towels.