Pollack Farm

Fossil Sites In Delaware

Delaware offers a few sites for fossil collectors, and the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal and the Pollack Farm are the best. Other locations throughout the state also offer good hunting grounds for fossil collectors. Just south of Dagsboro, where Route 113 crosses Pepper Creek, the collector can find young (less than 2 million year old) marine fossils from the Pleistocene Epoch. At the state sand and gravel pit just south of Middletown on Route 896, plant impressions from the Pleistocene may be found.

What is a fossil?

If you think you may have found a Delaware dinosaur or any unusual fossil, the scientists at the Delaware Geological Survey at the University of Delaware, Newark campus would like to see it. It could provide important information on the geologic history of the First State.

SP21 Geology and Paleontology of the Lower Miocene Pollack Farm Fossil Site Delaware

The Pollack Farm Site near Cheswold, Delaware, is named for a borrow pit excavated during highway construction. The excavation exposed a portion of the Cheswold sands of the lower Miocene Calvert Formation. Two sand intervals (Cheswold C-3 and C-4) yielded a diverse assemblage of land and marine vertebrate remains and more than 100 species of mollusks. An isolated occurrence of a sandy silt (the radiolarian bed) stratigraphically between the two macrofossil-bearing units yielded only siliceous microfossils—radiolarians, diatoms, and sponge spicules.