Vacationing Virginia Boy Finds Fossil on Stone Harbor Beach

STONE HARBOR – A 7-year-old Virginia boy, vacationing with his family, made the find of a lifetime collecting shells on the 98^th Street beach Aug. 18. Ryan Fedok, a second grader in Fairfax Station, picked up an unassuming lump at the water’s edge that was later identified as a 250-plus-million-year-old fossil.
That fossil was being formed eons before dinosaurs and man walked on earth, when New Jersey and what is now this resort was underwater.
According to his father, Jason Fedok, “Until this year our greatest find had been a foot-long conch shell (still occupied) that we returned to the ocean.”
“I didn’t know what to make of it at first and, after having no luck trying to identify it via the Internet, I emailed Carl Mehling at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.  He quickly identified it as a 250+-million-year-old fossil horn coral which are not native to the Stone Harbor area,” stated the elder Fedok.
Mehling wrote to Fedok, “You can tell your son that he is the lucky finder of a fossil horn coral. Horn corals were solitary corals that lived on Earth from the Ordovician to the Permian (as old as 500 million years and as young as 250).
“By comparison the oldest known dinosaurs are about 245 million years old. Stone Harbor is very far from any likely sources of a fossil like this so this was probably brought there by ocean currents or rivers, and, maybe if it came from northern New Jersey or even southern New York, glaciers might have also contributed to its movements. It holds a long and complex story so it should be looked at with wonder! Nice find!”
Fedok hopes that the ancient discovery will spark Ryan’s interest in science, and will certainly be a highlight at his class’ “show and tell” time.
Mehling is senior scientific assistant, Fossil Amphibian, Reptile, and Bird Collections, Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, New York City.
According to a 1976 report on the geology of Cape May County by the Department of Environmental Protection written by Carol S. Lucey, senior geologist, “About 14,000 years ago an improvement in the climate reversed the trend of widespread glaciation. The great ice sheet started to melt, releasing ice-locked water back into the ocean basins. Sea level rose and, in time, reached its present stand.
“The barrier islands developed during this time, probably as lines of dunes, breached spits or peninsulas retreating westward with advancing shoreline…The Cape May peninsula became subject to marine processes again.”