JACKSONVILLE
It's not going to break the Guinness World Record -- it may even be fairly common -- but Bill Riley thinks that his recent find is pretty special.
He said that the fossilized oyster weighed in at 5.8 pounds on his digital scale. It is 9.5 inches long and about 5.5 inches thick.
He stubbed his toe on it while surf-fishing for fun one day at North Topsail Beach
"I've been a commercial fisherman for 13 years, and I never saw an oyster this size," Riley said. "It may have been buried under the sand for decades," he said.
Patricia Weaver, the collections manager of geology and paleontology at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, Research and Collections, said, after looking at several digital images sent to her that it's a lot older than that -- probably about 22 million to 25 million years old.
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