In rural Prentiss County, on a triangle of land cornered between a stretch of U.S. 45 and Twenty Mile Creek, Joanna Byrd McDowell walked her two petite leashed dogs on a narrow clay path a few feet above the creek on a drizzly November morning. Taking her hand momentarily off the path’s parallel metal railing, she bent down and stuck her fingers in the brown clay.
When they emerged from the rain-laden dirt, her palm had in it a rounded shell fragment from an oyster. She spotted another connecting piece nearby, and her hand returned to the earth.
“I just walked right by it, and there it was,” the Ripley resident said as she picked up similar shells scattered in the area.
Joanna Byrd McDowell holds up shell fragments of an oyster at the W.M. Browning Cretaceous Fossil Park in Baldwyn, Miss., on Nov. 20, 2025. Credit: Allen Siegler / Mississippi Today
Joanna Byrd McDowell walks her two dogs at the W.M. Browning Cretaceous Fossil Park in Baldwyn, Miss., on Nov. 20, 2025. Credit: Allen Siegler / Mississippi Today
Northeast Mississippi is hundreds of miles away from any ocean waters that could make for a suitable home for an oyster — at least it is right now. But roughly 74 million years ago, when this mollusk may have lived, most of the state was submerged below the present-day Gulf of Mexico.
For the last three decades, the remnants of that time — fossils of shells, shark teeth and other marine life lining the soil surrounding and beneath Twenty Mile Creek — has attracted people from across the country to visit this highway-side land, now known as the W.M. Browning Cretaceous Fossil Park. Although easily missed by the thousands of daily drivers who cross the bordering U.S. 45 bridge, Browning has played an important role in both science and Mississippi history.
Its unique impact stretches to the present, as it’s the state’s only public park with space dedicated for fossil finding (another is being developed in Columbus and is expected to officially open within the next two years).
While there aren’t great ways to measure how many people visit this park each year, George Phillips, the paleontology curator at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science in Jackson, said he believes it brings enough traffic to have a significant positive economic impact on the surrounding towns. He said there are few geologic formations filled with fossils close to earth’s surface that are as easily accessible by the public.
“The intersection of all of these things make it so special,” he said.
During the later parts of the geologic Cretaceous Period, an era starting 145 million years ago and ending with the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, parts of the state’s northeast corner flip-flopped between being submerged completely underwater and emerging as coastal barrier islands. Scientists believe sharks, sponges and mollusks lived just above where humans would later develop buildings like Tupelo High School and roads like the Natchez Trace Parkway.
The present-day stretch of Twenty Mile Creek that slices through Browning has steep walls filled with tall grass and other vegetation. Phillips said the upper chalky walls have sediment from the deepest parts of the ocean, and the sandy creekbeds below contain residues of when Browning was part of a barrier island.
“The sea is waxing and waning,” he said as he pointed to a museum map of Mississippi’s geological history.
Eventually, after the Cretaceous Period ended 66 million years ago, the ocean gradually retreated all the way down to the present-day Gulf Coast. But remnants of Northeast Mississippi’s underwater ecosystem stayed in the Appalachian foothills.
Locals had found some of those time-capsules for decades before the park was ever considered, Phillips said. But their discoveries weren’t always taken seriously. An ABC Evening News clip from 1991 features a man who said others thought he was “loose in the head” when he told them about finding shark teeth there in the 1980s.
Public perception of the site changed after a 1990 summer construction project. That’s when the former Mississippi State Highway Department, now a part of the Mississippi Department of Transportation, was bulldozing a path through the hills of West Prentiss County to extend U.S. 45.
When the construction crew dug up the area around Twenty Mile Creek, workers uncovered beds filled with fossilized shark teeth and oyster shells, according to a 1992 report from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. The site also preserved evidence of prehistoric bites and borings, two types of remnants scientists broadly call trace fossils.
That discovery caught the ear of Patsy Johnson, who at the time was an earth science teacher a few miles from the construction site at Booneville High School. She had previously taken a class to dig for dinosaur fossils at another Prentiss County site near Pisgah.
When she heard about the shark and oyster fossil beds, she called her friend, Douglas Fleury. Fleury had helped start a community museum in Corinth years earlier, and in 1990, he was doing entomology education research at the University of Arizona.
“I said, ‘Fleury, I’ve got a project for us if you will come back and tackle it,’” Johnson said.
Together, they collaborated to apply for a grant from the National Science Foundation, an organization that had awarded Johnson the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching a few years earlier. Johnson and Fleury hoped funding from the department would let Booneville High School students be some of the first people to excavate the site through a project they called Students Teaching Others Paleontology, or STOP.
The proposal sought to teach girl students how they could discover and identify fossils in the region. Then, after they gained those skills, they would relay that information to the broader Northeast Mississippi community.
“We had to prove that we had something that was worthwhile for the students,” Johnson said.
The federal agency granted the Booneville School District just over $25,000 to do the exploration in the first half of 1991.
It was the first known National Science Foundation grant awarded to a high school for students to conduct novel research, according to Mississippi Today’s review of the foundation’s award database and annual reports going back to the 1950s.
Fleury flew from the Sonoran Desert back to Northeast Mississippi for the dig, which took place for about two weeks in the spring of 1991. The state Department of Environmental Quality report says the high school transformed the construction site into “a laboratory of geological education.”
Both boys and girls from Booneville High were ultimately invited to be part of the project, and Fleury said many of them started the dig more focused on staying clean than looking for fossils. That changed after a student found the first big shark tooth fossil.
“Then, the dirt flew everywhere,” Fleury said.
Jennifer Kendrick was a sophomore at Booneville High School that spring, and she was among the students spraying clay in pursuit of shark teeth remains. She said she finished the dig with lots of them.
Kendrick said she’s a natural skeptic who wants to see evidence before jumping to conclusions. That supercharged class field trip was filled with fossilized souvenirs that helped her better understand the underwater past of her hometown.
“That’s a little bit of proof to show how the earth has changed,” she said.
The Booneville High School dig added not only to the students’ personal knowledge but also to the scientific canon. One of Kendrick’s classmates, Ginger McAnally, discovered a fossil of an unusual-looking crab. Scientists later determined it was the first known time any person had found a fossil of that particular crab species.
Ginger died in a car crash just a few months after her discovery. Since then, the crab species has been named Tropidicarcinus mcanallyae — an ode to its Booneville High School discoverer. It’s one of at least two species discovered and documented around Twenty Mile Creek.
Both of those fossils are now part of the Natural Science Museum’s collection in Jackson and overseen by Phillips, the state paleontologist.
“It’s not just a new species,” he said of Ginger’s discovery. “This is a whole new genus. So that’s kind of a big deal.”
While the Booneville High School dig delayed U.S. 45’s extension, the site was paved shortly afterward. But Johnson, the earth science teacher, found ways to keep future exploration at Twenty Mile Creek alive.
A placard at the W. M. Browning Cretaceous Fossil Park in Baldwyn, Miss. Credit: Allen Siegler / Mississippi Today
She happened to be friends with Willie Browning, the co-owner of some of the land adjacent to the new road. Johnson remembers asking him whether he might be interested in making a part of this fossil-filled land available to anyone.
“He said, ‘I’ll let you have that little bit of land if you want to make a park out of that,’” she said.
Four years after the high school dig, she and Fleury helped Prentiss County officially establish the W.M. Browning Cretaceous Fossil Park in May 1995.
The land’s former owner died a few months before the park was officially dedicated, but Fleury and Johnson said members of the family were there for the event.
Before Browning passed, Johnson said she visited him in the hospital, where he was bedridden with pneumonia.
“I said, ‘Mr. Willie, I’m so sorry you’re sick, but it is really a big ordeal about that. You have really done us well,’” she said.
Since that dedication 30 years ago, Fleury has worked to make sure young people across the country can continue to learn from Prentiss County fossils. He helped get the clay path down to the creek built, was part of constructing additional picnic tables above the creek and wrote an instructional guide for kids at the park.
He also helps to ensure there are communal sieves and scoops for visitors who want to find new fossils and periodically leads field trips with local elementary and middle school students about the park.
Even after decades of mining the site, Fleury said the creek still and always will have lots of prehistoric capsules for people to take home.
“We will run out of people before we run out of fossils,” he said.
That stewardship for the park has paid dividends for the surrounding community, as it’s become a favorite place for lots of Northeast Mississippians. On a summer afternoon, Browning’s small dirt parking lot can fill up completely with cars and overflow into the nearby side street — vehicles filled with families looking to spend a day on the creek.
It’s the type of day trip Kendrick, the former Booneville High School student, and her two kids took for years. She returned to Prentiss County after attending college in Memphis and Hattiesburg, and she was surprised when she learned people were still finding fossils near where she and her friends did decades earlier.
Jennifer Kendrick sits at The Raven’s Nest coffee shop in Booneville, Miss., on Nov. 20, 2025. Credit: Allen Siegler / Mississippi Today
Kendrick, her son and her daughter would visit the creek a lot when they were younger, where the kids loved to catch frogs and bugs. She said her son, now a freshman at Booneville High School, has always wanted to be a paleontologist, and it was nice to have a place nearby where he could explore that interest.
It’s also a good way for her to remind her kids of her and her classmates’ roles in Twenty Mile Creek’s history.
“They tease me about, ‘Were you here when the sharks were here?’” she said.
Byrd McDowell, the Ripley resident at the park that November morning, has similar fond memories of spending summer days at Browning. She and her husband would drive to Browning and watch their five children play in the creek, occasionally wandering off to spots farther up or down the stream where they thought there could be more shark teeth.
“It gave them something to do without fighting,” she said.
That was over a decade ago. Her kids are all adults now, and her husband passed away recently. These days, Byrd McDowell’s relationship with Browning has changed.
She comes to the park, a place her husband loved, to find peace when she feels stressed by tasks that he used to take care of for her family.
“He liked to walk around the edges because he didn’t like getting in the water,” she said.
Sometimes, when Byrd McDowell has felt the need to sleep somewhere away from her house, she’s pulled her car underneath the nearby highway overpass and spent the night camping out. She said the sound of cars driving over the 34-year-old U.S. 45 bridge makes her feel safe.
Northbound and Southbound bridges of U.S. 45 stretch across by the W.M. Browning Cretaceous Fossil Park in Baldwyn, Miss. Credit: Allen Siegler / Mississippi Today
She said she’s grateful Browning has always provided her with the space she and her family have needed.
“You experience yourself about what’s going on.”
-- Article credit to Allen Siegler for Mississippi Today --
