Calvert Cliffs

The Maryland Geological Survey says the question it is asked more than any other is where you can collect fossils along Calvert Cliffs. Its answer opens with a disappointment: almost the entire Calvert County shoreline of Chesapeake Bay is privately owned, and public access is severely restricted.

Then it gets specific. Read it before you drive. Three locations offer public access and allow collecting, and only from the beach and from blocks that have already fallen. Taking material from the cliff face itself is not allowed, partly to protect the cliffs and partly because, as the survey puts it plainly, several people have been killed over the years by collapses. Matoaka Cottages near St Leonard is private land whose owners allow beach access for ten dollars a person, cash only, under-fives free, usually eight in the morning until sunset. Bayfront Park at Chesapeake Beach, long the best known of the three, is currently closed to non-residents. Collecting is best at low tide and after storms, when the bay has done the digging for you.

What you are hunting is Miocene, roughly six to twenty million years old. Three formations are exposed, and because the beds tilt gently southward you walk through time as you walk the shore: the older Calvert Formation at the northern end, then the Choptank, then the youngest St Marys in the south. The cliffs run about twenty-four miles from Chesapeake Beach down to Drum Point and stand between 66 and 131 feet high.

Most people come for shark teeth, megalodon above all. The same beds also record the Middle Miocene Climate Transition and a minor extinction event, and they have produced an ancestral baleen whale, Eobalaenoptera harrisoni, described from the Virginia end of the formation and the oldest known member of its family. Loon remains from the lowest beds, close to eighteen million years old, are among the oldest records of the genus anywhere. In 2004 the hobbyist Jeffery DiMeglio found a whale skull and shoulder blade that erosion from Hurricane Isabel had opened up; it is in the Calvert Marine Museum now.