By Connie Leinbach
Sometimes the treasures one finds along Ocracoke’s shores aren’t shells.
Sometimes they are prehistoric teeth, such as the bison tooth that Barry Gregware found while visiting the island with the North Carolina Shell Club the weekend of March 20.
While most of the club members were combing the beaches of Portsmouth Island, Gregware and his wife, Rhonda, of Maysville, Onslow County, strolled Springer’s Point.
He spotted a cool, shiny stone at the water’s edge.
“Wait a minute,” he said to himself as he turned it over. “That’s not a stone.”
A photo and a search on the internet confirmed that what he found looked the same as the photo in a Google search: it is fossilized bison teeth that likely are 10,000 years old.
“Ten thousand years ago, this was not an island,” he said, “and there probably were bison roaming around.”
The black object looks like a double row of fearsome-looking masticators.
“Can you imagine getting bit by a mouthful of these?” Gregware said while attending the club’s live auction on their second night on Ocracoke.
The unusual find got him the Find of the Day, in which club members display their best beach finds over the weekend.
This wasn’t the first such tooth specimen found on Ocracoke.
In his Island Journal, online at http://www.villagecraftsmen.com, island historian Philip Howard reported in February 2015 that a similar set of teeth was found on Ocracoke and also along the Springer’s Point shore.
At first someone thought it might be fossilized horse teeth, but a paleontologist later identified it as bison, Howard reported.
More than 10,000 years ago, this area was vastly different, wrote Pat Garber in a May 2015 Observer story about a jasper arrowhead found on the beach.
“As you gaze at that seemingly endless body of water, it’s hard to believe that 10,000 years ago one would have been looking at islands or even solid land, where now-extinct great mammoths and giant sloths roamed the landscape, pursued by a group of people, known today as Paleo-Indians, long since vanished,” she wrote.
A bison tooth specimen can be found in one of the displays in the Ocracoke Preservation Society, 49 Water Plant Rd.
