Peace River

Learn Florida's permit rule before you go, because it is unusually clear and unusually cheap. Shark and ray teeth, invertebrates and plant fossils may be collected and kept by anyone, with or without a permit. Every other vertebrate fossil found on state land needs one, it costs five dollars a year, and finds must be reported to the Florida Museum of Natural History, which is the official state repository. The museum may ask for a specimen. If it has not claimed one within sixty days it is yours, and in practice only about one per cent of reported fossils are ever requested. Around three thousand people hold permits.

Since shark teeth are the exempt category and this river is full of them, most people who come to sift gravel here never need the paperwork. The Peace also gives up mammal bone, though, and that is where the rule starts to matter.

The river runs 76 miles from the junction of Saddle Creek and the Peace Creek Drainage Canal northeast of Bartow, south through Hardee and DeSoto counties, and into the Charlotte Harbor estuary near Punta Gorda. Its basin covers 2,300 square miles. Most of the northern watershed is the country known as Bone Valley, and the fossils came first in the history: Pleistocene and Miocene material found across the area eventually led to the discovery of the phosphate deposits that became an industry.

The Florida Museum runs a long-term study of this exact stretch, the Peace River Paleo Project, led by Mackenzie Ross and Richard Hulbert, which divides the record into an upper and a lower Peace River fauna. It leans on amateur collectors, and donated specimens feed the research directly, which is the practical reason the reporting requirement exists.

The water matters as much as the bones. Fresh flow down the Peace holds the salinity balance of Charlotte Harbor, which supports endangered species alongside commercial shrimp, crab and fish harvests, and the river supplies over six million gallons of drinking water a day to the region.