Fossils, thanks to Floyd
                   Hurricane helps uncover outcrops
 

                   By The Associated Press
 

                   WILLIAMSBURG—Gerald
                   H. Johnson was thrilled when
                   he peered into a chasm
                   created when Hurricane
                   Floyd washed out an earthen
                   dam and emptied a pond.

                   “That’s beautiful,” he said.
                   “This is a gorgeous cut.”

                   Where a sturdy dam had only
                   days before bordered a picturesque pond beside one of Colonial
                   Williamsburg’s golf courses, there now was a 30-foot-wide ditch with
                   sides cut by floodwaters rushing not only into the dam itself but also into
                   the previously undisturbed ground beneath it.

                   And sticking out from those walls and littering the bottom of the chasm
                   were perhaps thousands of fossil shells.

                   Johnson found a way to the bottom of the gorge and picked up a
                   beautiful scallop shell nearly 8 inches wide.

                   “That’s Chesapecten jeffersonius,” he said, pegging it as a
                   4-million-year-old specimen of Virginia’s state fossil. “That’s what we
                   like to see.”

                   Johnson, a College of William & Mary geology professor, is well-known
                   as an expert on fossils and the layered sediments that hold clues to the
                   Earth’s geologic history. He and other geologists found a bonanza of
                   research opportunities in the hurricane-fueled water erosion that spelled
                   disaster for many people and communities.

                   In Floyd’s aftermath, Johnson received calls alerting him to a number of
                   newly uncovered fossil outcrops. A man in Middlesex County reported
                   that a dam washout there had uncovered a 15-foot-long field of bones
                   that could be the fairly complete remains of a prehistoric whale. Johnson
                   was eager to investigate.

                   “A little hurricane does a lot for geology,” he said.

                   Erosion, for Johnson and his colleagues, is one of the most helpful natural
                   avenues to uncovering scientific information about the Earth. The
                   scientists depend on storms to reveal new aspects of geologic features.

                   Johnson has been at William & Mary and doing research in southeastern
                   Virginia since 1965. Floyd uncovered the most spectacular outcrops he’s
                   seen in all that time, he said.

                   “This is massive erosion in this case,” he said while examining a
                   20-foot-long wall of 7 million- year-old fossil sediments. They were
                   uncovered by floodwaters on the downstream side of the dam across
                   Lake Matoaka just off Jamestown Road in Williamsburg.

                   “Geologically, it exposes more material than we’ve seen for ages. It’s
                   really spectacular.”

                   When Hurricane Floyd deluged Williamsburg with up to 16 inches of rain,
                   water rushing from Lake Matoaka blasted a huge area away from the
                   bank of the creek beneath it. The washout increased the size of a fossil
                   outcrop Johnson had known about from a 3-foot patch to a huge wall of
                   fossil-bearing mud and sand.

                   Fossil shells from the deposit were washed downstream and deposited
                   into large areas of broken and whole shells in greater numbers than
                   usually are found even at the seashore.