Family on fishing trip paused when 13-yr-old spotted odd-looking rock—closer inspection led to a 32-million-yr-old discovery
When the Colemans went for a fishing trip as a family, they never knew that they would discover something that would become a one-in-a-million find. The Colemans, including Adam, his wife Adrienne, and their two children Talah and Corey, enjoyed hunting fossils; it was a family tradition. But in 2021, during their trip, their daughter Talah discovered a giant rock, which, a year later, was found to be a 32-million-year-old discovery, per Fox10 News.
In 2021, Adam Coleman and his family went for a fishing trip to the Alabama River in Clarke County and were spending a splendid day outside on the waters, as the family engaged in fossil hunting. It was a unique family tradition that was passed down by Adam's father. "Anytime we’re on the river, we like to stop on the riverbank, take breaks from fishing, walk around and see what we can find. Shark's teeth and shark vertebrae," Adam shared. During their trip, their 13-year-old daughter Talah spotted an unusual rock that got her curious. "I was the one who pointed it out. I was like that rock looks a little weird. Me and my dad checked it out cause we thought it was just mud and we got closer to it and were like, that's not mud. That's something," Talah told Fox10.
A year later, after the family could not exactly figure out what it was, they decided to consult Dr. Andrew Gentry from the Gulf State Park Learning Campus. Here's where they learned the shocking and mesmerizing truth: the rock was none other than a fossilized shell of a leatherback sea turtle. "It is such an absolutely extraordinarily rare occurrence to get an intact leatherback shell like this. It is beyond one in a million," Dr. Gentry revealed. According to a 2013 study published in BMC Evolutionary Biology, a Late Triassic turtle from Germany was pronounced as the oldest known fossil turtle with a fully formed shell. The study re-examined its anatomy, including the girdles and vertebral column, and helped clarify early turtle evolution. The fossil is dated to be about 212-210 million years ago.
The Colemans joined Dr. Gentry's team to excavate the sea turtle shell fossil, where they "drilled and hammered spikes into it." The shell weighed up to one ton and was loaded in a boat loaned by the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. After the shell was secured, paleontologists around the U.S. were invited to determine the age of the shell, which was found to be 32 million years old and belonged to a never-before-discovered species and genus of leatherback sea turtles. The fossil is currently exhibited at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham. It was discovered on part of the Creek ancestral homeland, hence the members of the Poarch Creek Tribe were given the honor of naming the species in their native Muskogee language. They named it 'Ueloca colemanorum', meaning "water and turtle."