Paleontology in South Carolina

Evidence suggests that at least part of South Carolina was covered by a warm, shallow sea and inhabited by trilobites during the Cambrian period.

Other than this, little is known about the earliest prehistory of South Carolina because the Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, and Jurassic, are missing from the state's local rock record.

[3] During the Late Cretaceous, the flora of South Carolina included trees like eucalyptuses, laurel, magnolias, oak, sequoia, walnut, and willows.

[2] Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils have been found at several Donoho Creek Formation sites in northeastern South Carolina.

[6] During the Eocene, South Carolina was home to the corals Coelohelia wagneriana and Haimesiastraea conforta and the oyster Ostrea arrosis.

[7] Middle Tertiary phosphate beds in the state have produced marine fossils like shark teeth, fish bones, and ray dental plates.

[9] Miocene life of South Carolina included a great diversity of mollusks, who left behind a wide variety of fossil shells.

[6] Pleistocene fossils are fairly rare, except for the abundant marine mollusk shells at the Stono River and Yonges Island.

[10] In 1725, Mark Catesby, an English botanist visited a plantation called Stono, where slaves had uncovered several large fossil teeth while digging in a swamp.

Later, in 1942, George Gaylord Simpson "grudgingly" conceded that the African slaves at Stono were the first to scientifically identify a North American vertebrate fossil.