Paleontology in Mississippi

At the time, the northeastern part of the state was covered in a sea where brachiopods, crinoids, and trilobites lived.

However, during the Cretaceous, evidence suggests that the state was covered by a sea home to cephalopods, mosasaurs and sharks.

By the Cenozoic, only the southern half of the state was covered in seawater, where the early whale Basilosaurus lived.

The Eocene whales Basilosaurus cetoides and Zygorhiza kochii are the Mississippi state fossils.

The shallow sea that formed in Mississippi at that time was home to a rich fauna of both invertebrates and vertebrates.

[1] Cretaceous marine invertebrate life of Mississippi included cephalopods, coccolithophores, coelenterates, gastropods, the tube-shaped trace fossils Halymenites major, oysters, and scaphopods.

[4] Both of Mississippi's pre-Mesozoic and Cretaceous deposits formed in what is now the southern region of the state, in a physiographic province called the Gulf Coastal Plain.

[5] Bony fish, sharks, and whales also lived in the early Cenozoic seas of Mississippi.

[1] Unlike southern Mississippi, the state's northern half persisted as a terrestrial environment covered by forests and swamps.

These beliefs could have been influenced by the folklore of runaway African slaves rather than being pure fossil legends in the strict sense, but the Paiute tribe of northern Nevada did wage a three year war against a race of cannibalistic red-haired giants, who they trapped in Lovelock Cave and then burned to death.

[9] Since the implementation of paleontology as a formal science in the state, many Cretaceous fossil sites have been serendipitously discovered in the process of searching for oil.