Amateur fossil collector and Newport resident Kent Gibson sits on the back of his truck posing with two fossils he collected in this provided photo taken on Feb. 15, 2023. The fossil on the right is of a whale skull and the one on the left has yet to be determined, according to Gibson, who has collected thousands of fossils along the beaches of Newport.
Courtesy Kent Gibson
Nearly 30 years ago, Newport resident Kent Gibson headed out with his dog to the beach one day to look for agate and jasper, types of gemstones he collected as a hobby at the time. He picked up what looked like a baseball-sized rock, threw it for his dog to fetch and then took it home for his dog to play with. But it turns out it wasn’t a rock.
It was a fossil of a skull from a porpoise that lived 20 million years ago.
That discovery sparked a new calling for Gibson as an amateur fossil collector. The Salem Statesman Journal shared that story and more in its recent profile of the retired Newport harbormaster and his amazing skill at finding fossils, mostly of prehistoric marine mammals and fish.
Gibson estimates his collection now numbers between 5 and 6,000 fossils, some of which he can spend 100 hours or more painstakingly cleaning to reveal skulls, vertebrae, ribs or other prehistoric bones encased in sediment and rock.
Gibson hopes to donate his collection someday to the Condon Fossil Collection at the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History, but the facility doesn’t currently have the space to house it. Gibson joins us to talk about his amazing paleontological finds and tips for fellow fossil hunters.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Almost 30 years ago, Newport resident and avid rock hound Kent Gibson went to the beach looking for agate and jasper. He also brought home a baseball-sized rock that his dog seemed to like, but it wasn’t any old rock. It turns out it was a fossil of a skull from a porpoise that lived 20 million years ago. As reported recently in The Statesman Journal, Gibson was hooked. In the decades since then, he figures he has collected between 5,000 and 6,000 fossils. Some of them are now in the Smithsonian’s collection, and Kent Gibson joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Kent Gibson: Thanks, Dave. Nice to be here.
Miller: Can you tell us about that day, almost 30 years ago, when you found that first fossil?
Gibson: Yeah, I had about a half a bucket of agates and jaspers and getting ready to leave the beach, and right at the base of the trail I saw this little round rock that had some black-looking stuff on it. And I picked it up and looked at it and thought, “Huh, that looks weird.” And I threw it down the beach, and my dog Bart was kind of a rock hound, so he’d run and chase the rock down that I threw and bring it back.
I threw it further down the beach for him, and I grabbed my bucket and headed to my truck and was putting my bucket in the truck. Bart runs up and drops his rock on my foot. And so I say, “Okay Bart, you can keep your rock.” I threw it in the back of the pickup and loaded him up and off we went. When I got home, I was reaching into my bucket, and I looked down at that rock and it looked like it was staring at me. What I was seeing I later found out was the nasal opening of a small porpoise skull.
Miller: Did Bart… I don’t think I’ve ever heard a dog be described as a rock hound, but it makes perfect sense. Do you think that he was responding to million-year-old bones, or he just liked this rock?
Gibson: Well, I can throw a rock in the water and he’d dive down two or three, four feet and pick up that rock and bring it back to me.
Miller: Okay, so he likes to retrieve things in general. He was not a genius.
Gibson: No, he was a black lab.
Miller: What was it about that – about finding what turned out to be a porpoise skull – that set you on this very different path?
Gibson: Well, I guess it would be that, in the first place I had no clue there were bones of any kind down on the beach, and I’ve been down there collecting for quite a while. So over the course of about the next five years or so, as I was agate hunting, I started looking for pieces of bone. And like I said, after about five years, I got a real good eye for it, and sometimes I’d be bringing home 25 to 30 pieces of bone on some days.
Miller: In one day?
Gibson: Right.
Miller: What were you looking for? As you say, you got a pretty good eye for this. What are the telltale signs, for you, of fossils?
Gibson: Well, most of the fossils are in a gray matrix, and the bone itself is more of a brown color. So I look for the brown color in a gray rock, basically.
Miller: How far away can you spot them at this point?
Gibson: I can spot them quite a few feet away, but I mean, it’s more of a question of how fast can I walk looking for them and spotting them. So I go down and do a grid search on the beach and I go at a pretty good clip, and my eye picks up the brown color just almost instantly, and so I stop and pick it up and look and see what it is.
Miller: What is it about the beaches on the Oregon coast that make them so rich for fossil hunters?
Gibson: Here around Newport where I live, there’s a couple of beaches that have formations exposed to the ocean waves and stuff, so the waves are constantly eroding the softer material around the concretions that these fossils form in, and so they get rolled up on the beach on a pretty regular basis.
Miller: What are the rules for collecting fossils in Oregon?
Gibson: Well, I’ve actually got a permit from the old state geologists for collecting fossils and also a member of the North American Research Group that used to have a blanket thing for picking up fossils through the Oregon State Parks.
The main rule is you can’t dig in the banks or the cliffs underneath people’s houses, for instance. That’s why they don’t allow you to do that. So you’re not undermining somebody’s million-dollar house on a bluff.
Miller: But if there’s just some skull, some fish bone on the beach, anybody can come by and take it home?
Gibson: Yeah, that’s correct. You just can’t sell it.
Miller: Oh, interesting. The rule is not about collecting, but it’s about monetizing.
Gibson: Right, you can’t. And I think the reasoning behind that is if you saw, for instance, a big fossil in the cliff that you wouldn’t dig it out because it’s against the law, so I think that’s why they have that rule.
Miller: What happens after you bring one of these finds home? Let’s say that it’s in this other rock, so there is the bone there surrounded by rock. What do you do to clean it?
Gibson: Well, I’ve got three different air scribes that I can start prep-working on it. And when I get most of the matrix away from the bone then I can either use a mini-sandblaster that I have, or sometimes I put the stuff in acetic acid, which is basically vinegar, and it melts off the host rock and leaves the bone exposed.
Miller: Is a part of you always on the lookout for fossils at this point?
Gibson: While I’m on the beach, it is. I was down there once in the middle of summertime, just taking my dog for a walk one time, and usually I don’t even go down in the summer cause all the rock beds get covered up with sand. I was walking along, there’s like eight rocks out in this spot and I walked over there, and there was a great big whale vertebrae, just sitting there that people had walked by all day long, because I saw footprints within a foot of it.
Miller: How heavy are some of the rocks that you have to take home?
Gibson: I’ve collected some that are probably in the neighborhood of five or six hundred pounds. I’m working on one right now, I think it’s got a whale skull or part of a whale skull, some vertebrae and I think some rib bones in it, and like I said, it’s probably close to 600 pounds, I believe.
Miller: How do you get that home? How do you just move it at all from the beach?
Gibson: I’ve built a couple of things for hauling stuff down the beach. I’ve got an old Stokes litter that I welded an axle from an old oxy-acetylene cart onto, and put a bicycle tire on the front, and then I can take that down the beach, roll those things into there, and then just kind of pull it down the beach until I get it to my truck where I’ve installed a little hoist in there, and then I can just put a net around them and hoist them up in the back of my pickup.
Miller: How old are the fossils that you’re typically finding?
Gibson: So, north of town here, the Astoria Formation, I’ve been told it’s about 17.2 million years old, and south of Newport, the Nye Mudstone Formation is about 20 million years old, and I think there’s another formation just a little bit further south called the Yaquina Formation. I think that’s somewhere between 20 and 23 million years old.
Miller: Has spending all this time with these bits of animals that lived 17, 20, 23 million years ago, has it affected the way you think about time?
Gibson: I don’t think it really affects the way I think about time. It’s just that I’ve got this drive, I guess, to find stuff. I’ve always been a finder of stuff. I used to have a gold dredge, and I dredged off and on in my spare time for 26 years, and then moved to metal detecting and mineral hunting down in Nevada. So this is just another kind of thing that I do, since it’s so close to town here and my house, that I can do it a lot.
Miller: Okay. So it doesn’t seem like you’re lying in bed at night imagining these creatures swimming around or running around, but if you did have a time machine and you could go back at some point in the past, is there an era you’d most want to see?
Gibson: I think I’d probably like to go back to the Miocene Era, which is basically the rocks that are in this area, just to see what the animals really looked like that lived here back then.
Miller: As I noted, you have 5,000 or 6,000 fossils in your collection at this point. A handful of them have been sent to Washington D.C., to the Smithsonian, but with so many fossils just in your shed right now waiting to be cleaned and cataloged, some of them just waiting to be even… Someone has to figure out what exactly it is, have you gotten pickier at this point, or do you bring home every fossil that you find?
Gibson: I pretty much try and bring home every fossil I find. A lot of it is just nondescript pieces of bone and you’ll probably never tell what animal it’s from. Some of those I’ve given away to kids and different people over the years because they’re just not scientifically that valuable. But one in 100 or maybe one in 500 fossils can be really special. So, it’s like always on the lookout for that special fossil.
Miller: Where do you hope that the thousands of fossils that you have right now, where they’ll eventually end up?
Gibson: Eventually, they’re gonna all end up at University of Oregon at the Condon collection. However, right now, the university there can’t really take them right now because they don’t have room. Their repository already has so many fossils in them that they have no room left for my collection.
I had a meeting with some people from the university, I think in February, last February, and they said it might be a couple of years before they even find room for my collection there. So what really needs to happen is the university or – it’s supposed to be a state repository – the university really needs to have a bigger repository and maybe even a bigger museum at some point, but I don’t know how that’s going to be in the cards with the way finding money is these days.
Miller: Do you have space for your collection at this point?
Gibson: Yeah, I’ve got them all out in my shop. I got a 40 by 60 shop out here on my property and I’ve got most of them out in that shop there now.
Miller: What advice would you give to somebody who’s just starting out or wants to get started as a fossil hunter?
Gibson: Oh, well, just go down and start looking. Try and train your eyes to see the color of bone that’s in this area or wherever area they’re at, ‘cause they’re a little bit different no matter where you go. And once you have an eye for that, then keep looking because you’ll start finding stuff.
Miller: Kent, thanks very much.
Gibson: Oh, you’re welcome.
Miller: Kent Gibson is an amateur fossil collector based in Newport. He has found somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 fossils on the Oregon coast over the last nearly three decades.
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