Cold waves lapping at his rubber-booted feet, Jason Osborne fishes into his pocket and pulls out a flathead screwdriver. Kneeling, he pushes it gently into a craggy, waist-high rock and carefully scrapes away millions of years of embedded sand to reveal the distinctive curves of an Ecphora—an extinct marine snail that inhabited Maryland's coastal waters in prehistoric times.

A screwdriver might not be the first tool that comes to mind for a paleontological dig. But for this fossil hunter, it's the tool of choice.

“It fits in my pocket and does just what I need it to,” he says.

Considering Osborne's day job, it's no wonder the screwdriver feels natural in his hand. The mechanical engineer is part of the instrument design and fabrication team at HHMI's Janelia Farm Research Campus, where he helps build imaging and electrophysiology tools for studying the brain.

		Hunting Fossils Explore the beaches of Maryland's Calvert Cliffs with Jason Osborne.

A self-taught aficionado of fossilized marine life, Osborne spends most weekends on the beaches flanking Maryland's hundreds of miles of inland waterways. The Calvert Formation—cliffs that line the western coast of the Chesapeake Bay from mid-Maryland to southern Virginia—is a favorite spot for Osborne and other avid fossil hunters, amateur and professional.

Those cliffs contain Miocene deposits, composed of sediment laid down when the area was covered by ocean, some 10 to 23 million years ago. The cliffs periodically disgorge the remains of sea creatures preserved in sand and rock onto the beaches below. Fossils are so abundant that any beachcomber with a sharp eye can spot ancient shark teeth, mollusks, and bone fragments from marine mammals, such as sea cows and porpoises.

Photo: James Kegley

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