March
20, 2003
Fossil
fanatic: Beachcomber finds ancient bones where others see rocks
By Mike Stahlberg
The
Register-Guard
NEWPORT
- Guy DiTorrice has been a radio newsman, the PR man for Keiko the Whale's Oregon
home, a volunteer fireman and, most recently, a bank manager.
But DiTorrice appears happiest when he's walking the beach with a multi-colored
watch cap pulled down over his ears and his coat pockets full of rocks.
 |
|  |
|  Guy
DiTorrice of Newport began sharing his knowledge of fossils with school and community
groups in 1997. Photos:
Kevin Clark / The Register-Guard |
| |
|
That's
when he's "The Oregon Fossil Guy," engrossed in finding treasures that most beach
visitors mistake for ordinary rocks.
The rocks that end up in DiTorrice's pockets contain fossils, the hardened remains
or traces of plants and animals that died millions of years ago, then became entombed
in sand, soil or ash that later metamorphosed into rock.
Oregon's beaches are thick with such rocky time capsules, and DiTorrice delights
in opening visitors' eyes to the geologic stories under their feet.
Indeed, his unbridled enthusiasm for fossils and for what they tell us about Oregon's
past has helped turn his hobby into a part-time tour business. "The
Oregon Fossil Guy" gives interpretive talks on fossils at state parks campgrounds
and leads educational beach tours, teaching people how to read the record Nature
has written in the rocks of ages gone by. He's also leading the effort to persuade
the Oregon Legislature to designate a "state fossil" (see story below).
To his practiced eye, finding fossils on the Oregon beach is as easy as finding
Easter eggs on a green lawn. Different colors, shapes and textures cry out to
be discovered. "There's
500 or 600 fossils in that pile of cobble right there," DiTorrice says while standing
in a parking area overlooking a jumble of rounded rocks on a beach north of Newport.
"People
have walked over them all their lives and and never realized they're there."
A few minutes later DiTorrice is holding what appears to be a small seashell with
hard sand between its two halves. "Most
people would just toss that away, thinking it's a contemporary shell," DiTorrice
said. "They don't realize that 'sand' inside is really sandstone that is 15 million
years old." Later, someone
picks up a grapefruit-sized chunk of two-tone gray rock - one area of which is
speckled with tiny white shell shapes - and shows it to DiTorrice.
His eye goes not to the bits of fossilized seashell, but to the shape and texture
of the darker gray portion of the rock. "Hey,
you've got a whale vertebrae there," he said, pointing out the shape of a filled-in
spinal column and the tell-tale porous texture of what was once bone.
"People are picking up fossilized
bones all the time here without realizing they've got a 15 million-year-old fish
bone in their hands," he said. "Or a whale bone like that, which came out of a
whale that died 20 million years ago."
How does he know that? "It's
a lot like forensics," he said, walking along the beach. "You're looking at one
or two pieces of information and drawing conclusions from them."
For example, DiTorrice can date Newport-area beach fossils by the color of the
material in which they are embedded. Gray rock is from a volcanic ash flow 20
million years ago. Brown sandstone is from another geologic age about 15 million
years ago. It was while
on a similar beach not long after moving to Newport in 1991 that DiTorrice picked
up something that rekindled a childhood fascination with fossils. "I
found these shells, and I picked up a dozen of them," he said. "I went home and
cleaned them up, and I cracked a book about fossils. I went back the next day
and grabbed a couple more. "That
was 68 milk crates ago."
Now DiTorrice combs beaches and headlands two or three times a week.
"It's my golf," he said.
In 1997, a journal of amateur paleontology called "Fossil News" published an article
DiTorrice wrote entitled "On the Beach: Finding Miocene Fossils in Oregon."
That led to an article in the Newport newspaper, which led to invitations to speak
to local civic clubs, which led to his first contract - for giving interpretive
campfire talks at state parks to leading nature walks, talking "about why stuff's
here and where it came from."
He became the "Oregon Fossil Guy" in 1998 when his son was putting together an
Internet site (www.oregonfossilguy.com) for his fledgling tour business. The word
play on his first name became etched even more deeply in legal stone when the
business incorporated (Oregon Fossil Guy, Inc.).
DiTorrice says he now has about 20 tour contracts with various schools, agencies
and groups, including Campbell Senior Center in Eugene and the Elderhostel program
at Lane Community College.
Private parties can book tours for two or more people. Rates start at $19 per
person. DiTorrice, who
has a degree in journalism and once worked as a newsman at radio station KASH
in Eugene, has no formal training in paleontology. Since moving to Newport, he
has worked as public relations man for the Oregon Coast Visitors association and
then the Oregon Coast Museum, which was home to Keiko for several years.
Earlier this year he was hired to manage the Oregon State University Federal Credit
Union's branches on the northern coast.
The Fossil Guy is a self-taught amateur paleontologist. His personal library includes
more than 800 books and monographs on fossils, paleontology and geology.
His will specifies that his library and collection of just over 3,000 cataloged
fossils is to be donated to a museum. And
museums should be interested.
The Smithsonian Museum, for example, has a 6,000-specimen collection of fossils
gathered from the beaches north of Newport in the 1950s and '60s, DiTorrice said.
They were collected by
a man named Doug Emlong, Newport's fossil guy of an earlier era. Fossil-finders
reminders • It
is legal in Oregon to collect beach fossil souvenirs and to trade them; however,
the sale or commercial use of fossils is prohibited. •
Beach fossils may be collected without a permit everywhere except where specifically
prohibited. Beach areas closed to fossil collecting include all shorelines adjacent
to state parks, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land
Management natural areas, marine preserves, national monuments, forests, campgrounds,
waysides and day-use areas. •
Beach fossils may be taken only from the state recreation area, which extends
from the extreme low tide line to the established upland vegetation line. However,
fossils may not be extracted from the exposed walls of headlands. That is considered
mining and contributes to the erosion of the headlands. Related: Fossil
buffs push for another state symbol | 
