The pits across the street are the point. The Aurora Fossil Museum keeps two fossil pits in its Fossil Park, filled with tailings from the nearby phosphate mine, and visitors are allowed to collect from them and keep what they find. Shells, coral and shark teeth turn up easily, which makes this one of the gentlest introductions to fossil hunting on the east coast: no cliff, no tide, and no need for heavy tools.
Two practical things. Admission to both the museum and the fossil park is free, though the museum is a non-profit that runs on donations and gift shop sales. And the park keeps museum hours exactly, so if the museum is closed the pits are closed with it. The schedule shifts by season and drops Mondays and Tuesdays through the winter, so check the calendar before making the drive.
What is in the piles is roughly 22 to 2.5 million years old, out of the Pungo River and Yorktown formations, spanning the early Miocene to the Pliocene. That is coastal plain sea floor, and the fossil people come for is the shark tooth. The museum's collection is organised around them, with displays covering shark dentitions, megalodon, Parotodus, stingray and cetacean material, and a shark tooth identification guide that becomes genuinely useful once you have a pocket full of black triangles and no idea what any of them are.
The museum was founded in 1976 and opened in 1978, and the way it came together explains why the pits exist at all. It was a collaboration between the town of Aurora, the local mines, East Carolina University and other interested parties: the mine supplies the spoil, the museum supplies the interpretation, and the public gets to dig. Since 1993 there has been a Fossil Festival every year over the Memorial Day weekend, fossil auction included.
Sifting the spoil piles is free and needs no permit.
Shark teeth, whale bone · Miocene to Pliocene
Open to the public for collecting, and what you find is yours to keep. Check the posted rules before you start: they can change with the season and the landowner.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
