Shark's teeth and bay scallop - some of those black things in the sand are real old petrified shark's teeth, like a million years old. They can get pretty big, too, sometimes several inches across.
	Knobbed whelk - our Carolina conch, and edible just like its relatives in the Caribbean. They eat shellfish and dead marine animals. Large, up to 12 inches in length.
	Olive shell - a big snail that lives out in deeper water. It is the South Carolina State Shell. It's sometimes called the 'lettered olive shell' because sometimes the markings look like writing.
	Cockle shell - One of the most common on Carolina beaches. Wide variety of colors and sizes. Edible, frequently eaten in Europe, less frequently here.
	Quahog Clam - or hard-shelled clam, are most common, and are the chowder clams.
	Quartz rock - When the Appalachian mountains were young and actively eroding, rocks would tumble down the mountainside and fall into streams and rivers and be carried to the ocean, only to be carried up to the beach by the surf.
	Ribbed mussel - You'll find these over in the marshes. Edible and sought after by man and raccoon and shore birds.
	Angel wings - a very fragile shell, it is unusual to find one that has survived pounding in the surf. Like mussels, this bivalve is edible, too.
	Red algae - most marine plants, except for the grasses, are algae. Red algae and a green algae called 'sea lettuce' are common, and sometimes great amounts of another algae, sargassum, blows in from the Sargasso Sea, about a thousand miles away.
	Conglomerate - it's like a marine life condo, with layer after layer of shell forms and smaller communities of other, even smaller, critters of some sort.
	Mother stone - well, it looks like a mud stone with worm holes, to me, but there may be more to it than that. There's a little note about them on top of the display case at the 'Missiles & More' Museum. Much revered by ancient cultures as talismans related to goddess religions.
	Turkey Wing - a peculiar shell, almost rectangular, and heavy, and very numerous around New River Inlet. Once you learn to spot them, it seems, they're everywhere.
	Moon shell - a predator snail, this gastropod rasps through a clam's shell and sucks the clam out through the hole.
	Cross-barred Venus clam - easy to identify because the radial ridges are crossed by concentric bars across the face of the outer shell. Edible, excellent in chowder.
	Razor clam - shave with them? Maybe, the edges are very sharp. Edible, and sought after, but you have to be pretty quick to catch them.
	Green algae - another form of algae that usually anchor themselves to the sea bed but sometimes break off and float ashore.
	Dead man's fingers - a sponge, I think, green when alive. Frequently washed up in smaller pieces.
	Sea urchin - this is the sea urchin skeleton, what's left after all the spines have fallen off. This one is cemented together in hard sand on its way to forming limestone in about a million years.
	Coral - these are skeletal remains of a coral condominium, a community of coral polyp animals that live together. Most live in warmer waters, but some live this far north, probably because the Gulf Stream flows near here.