My boys have long loved looking for shark’s teeth on the beach so I decided to try to find a good spot in NJ to go hunting for them. Imagine my surprise when a google search for NJ shark teeth popped up not a beach but a creek 15 miles inland.
Big Brook Preserve is located in Colts Neck, NJ and is home to fossils that date back to the late Cretaceous Period (67-74 million years ago). During the Cretaceous period, NJ was submerged underwater. Prehistoric animal remains that were left on the sea floor became buried over time under the sediment of the rising shore. These marine fossil layers are exposed today by the brook that cuts through the earth.
We headed to Big Brook Preserve one afternoon, ill-prepared but excited. We didn’t have a real sifter or a trowel, just a plastic kitchen sifter, our eyes and our hands. But that was all part of the adventure. We parked in one of the few spots in the gravel strip on the side of the road and headed down the trail.
The creek was on our right and you could basically cut down to it at any point you deemed appropriate. We found a spot that seemed to have a small trail that had been worn down by previous fossil hunters and followed it to the creek.
It was really pretty and peaceful along the creek. There were two other better-prepared young adult fossil hunters downstream from us, and we could hear a family with younger kids further downstream. But they all wandered in their own directions and it was mostly just us and the creek and its buried treasures.
We didn’t find any dinosaurs that day but we did find a shark’s tooth, a squid pen, and a still-yet-to-be-identified bone of some sort. I’m sure with proper tools we could have unearthed more fossils but the boys were happy with what they found.
There is a handy Fossil Identification chart at the entrance to the trail that we used to identify their finds. More fossil identification information can be found online at njfossils.net.
Overall this was a fun afternoon. The boys loved being outside and wading in the creek, and finding a few fossils was a bonus. We spent a little over an hour there but I can see going back and staying longer if we had the proper tools to bring with us. Note that there are some rules about what tools you can use (trowels with a blade no more than 6 inches and sifting screens no more than 18 square inches) and how many fossils you can take per day (5), neither of which should be a big deal for casual family fossil hunters. This is an easy, fun and unique outing to do with kids of any age.
