Waynesville home is full of fossils collected locally | Local News

He was about 13, and 54 years later he and his wife, Martha, are confined to just a couple of rooms of their house in Waynesville. The rest is taken up by the Kirby Kids Fossil Museum.

Kirby seldom goes anywhere without a big black or deep gray fossilized shark tooth hanging around his neck and a long silver pony tail hanging down the center of his back. That’s what everyone wants, he said, except for the scientists who write the scholastic papers and journals on creatures that have long since disappeared.

University paleontologists have beaten a bath to the Kirby door to examine what he has found and sometimes pick up fossils he has found mostly in Glynn County. His fossils have extended the range of some long dead species especially invertebrates.

Kirby doesn’t mind seeing his name in the newspaper, but he’d rather see it in scholastic papers and he’s done that more than once.

Roger W. Portell, collection director of invertebrate paleontology and micropaleontology at the University of Florida, was the latest to give Kirby credit for his collection of tower mollusks for their long shells.

He got credit for identifying the extinct diamondback terrapin in Georgia as noted in the Bulletin of American Paleontology. There were listings of four species of turritellidae never before found in Georgia.

Portell addressed that in saying, “Specimens from Georgia, however, have never been discussed in the paleontological literature,’’ he wrote. “We can do so here due to the efforts of collector Mr. Chet Kirby.”

The journals and bulletins all list scientific names derived from Latin, and as Kirby said, “Most of the things I find, I can’t pronounce.”

That remark is self-effacing given the ease with which he rattles off his findings.

He is the son of retired Navy Cmdr. Albert Dean Kirby who died Jan. 18, 2022, at 92. His father played varsity football at UCLA where he was on a Navy ROTC scholarship. Cmdr. Kirby was a Navy aviator and his career ultimately brought him to Glynn County where he was the executive officer of Glynco Naval Air Station and where he was officer in charge of all Navy and Marine Corps air traffic control training.

Upon retirement, his father moved on, but Chet Kirby never left. Not long after he stepped on that shark’s tooth, he began shark fishing, and people still tell stories of the huge shark he landed. But he also began finding a few fossils, and it turned into an avocation. It was easy as a young man, but he had polio as a one-year-old and it came back in 1990 as post polio syndrome, which usually occurs up to 30 years afterward and can cause disability. It affected one of Kirby’s legs and he was compelled to quit work because he couldn’t stand for extended periods.

He now walks with the aid of a forearm crutch, if he hasn’t broken it as he did recently as he watched grandchildren during field day at Waynesville Elementary.

He is still able, however, to look for fossils periodically in the waterways he and his father fished, in Joynter Creek, Fancy Bluff Creek, the East River, the Turtle, MacKay and South Brunswick rivers. He gets access to dredge spoil sites, and has taken Smithsonian paleontologists to Andrews Island.

He usually has his children with him. When he had Smithsonian scientists with him there in the 1990s one of them found a piece of black bone.

“What’s this, Chet?’’ he asks.

Kirby glanced at the find and said, “Tell him Chester,” which Chester did with ease.

When the Sidney Lanier Bridge was built, Kirby found more specimens as he did when they dumped dredged soil on Colonel’s Island to build an overpass on U.S. 17. That continuing work is one of the reasons the biggest room in his house is filled with orderly displays of shells, jaw bones, vertebrae and blackened fragments of long-extinct animals.

“We’ve got 110 species and 400,000 specimens. Around 300,000 are micro,’’ he said.

“We’ve got around 70,000 marine and land mammal fossils,’’ and 1,000 of those have yet to be identified, he said.

Those micro fossils are up high, stored and labeled in tiny tubes.

He found a new species of a mollusk called an argopecten.

“It’s under debate how it got there,’’ Kirby said.

He found a new species of vasum, which resembles a whelk.

“They haven’t named it yet,’’ he said.

He leaves the debate over origins and the naming to the scientists. He just keep looking for more.

With his disability, Kirby sometimes searches seated in a canoe, scooping muck off the bottom and dumping it into crawfish baskets attached like outriggers. And he still has his family with him.

His oldest son, Chester, lives next door with his family that includes L.C., or Little Chester.

The fossils are displayed like any museum would, but the hall into the house is lined with photos of his children and grandchildren and certificates recognizing things he found.

Like most Southern men, he has his hunting trophies in an inside room. Chester’s first dear is mounted, and hanging nearby is one with an impressive set of antlers that Little Chester killed.

With paleontologists having looked and studied for years, it is hard to imagine much that is unknown, but Kirby is still helping rewrite the fossil history. In one of his display cases he has the only known atlas vertebra of the extinct Caribbean monk seal.

Kirby says he’ll keep looking and finding. If the pattern holds, he’ll find things never seen before in Georgia and scientists will find their way to Waynesville. A European paleontologist has some of his sea urchin specimens.

He may be slower now given his disability and his age, but compared to what he has on display, 67 isn’t that old.