One day in 2003, Furniss Payton Barganier was building a shed in Fort Deposit when he kicked a rock.  By chance, he looked down and saw that it looked different from other rocks.  Upon inspecting it closely, he discovered that there were shell imprints on one side of it.

Fossil A shell-imprinted rock found in Lowndes County The rock, a piece of a black iron ore, had at some time been cracked into two sections.  The piece that he found showed that the rock had been formed on top of animals with a shell.   The matter that formed the rock, most certainly, had to have been hot volcanic material for it to harden to show the imprints of the different shapes and sizes of shells.

There are iron ore rocks scattered all around on this property, in and out of the ground, so it is a coincidence that Furniss even gave the rock a second look.  The discovery of this shell-imprinted rock bears some evidence to the theories held by some geologists that this area had once been covered by water and also that volcanic ash did indeed at some point in time cover North America.  (See: "Rocks and Soils" and "Artifacts Found in Lowndes County").