Hunting for shark teeth with Annick De Ridder: “Finding fossils brings peace to my head” (Antwerp)
Annick De Ridder lives alone in an apartment in the city. During the lockdown, she found it quite difficult to stay healthy if only physically. Working at home, not seeing family friends, it was tough, she admits. “Fortunately, I was still able to keep looking for fossils. That gave rust in the head.”
fossils? The paleontologist in her was awakened more than 30 years ago. As a child she moved to Heist with her parents. They rented an apartment there during the winter months, where they spent the Christmas holidays and weekends. There young Annick spent time with the local children. They started catching crabs, fishing and walking hunched over the beach for hours looking for shark teeth.
“I was ten when I started doing it, but I’ve always kept doing it,” says the ships in her apartment, where she has lived since the late 1980s. “Sometimes less, sometimes more intensively. For me it’s the ideal way to clear the head. And it happens every time, the moment I find one, my heart skips a beat.”
She searches in different places. At sea you can find masses of small teeth of sand tiger sharks in and around the Zwin. The beach at Vosseslag, a hamlet of De Haan, where they have moved large amounts of sand, is also a gold mine for fossil hunters.
But the good thing is that as an Antwerper you don’t have to go to the barren West Flanders at all to find such years-old fossils. “The city is in fact one big shark graveyard,” says Annick De Ridder. “In the Neogene, this area was 100 meters below sea level. We speak of the period between 23 million and 2.5 million years ago. When the water receded, all those fossils were left behind.”
She shows a megalodon incisor, the distant ancestor of the great white shark, almost a palm in size, which she found in the dockland area, the edges serrated like a knife. As chairman of the Board of Directors of Port of Antwerp-Bruges, she obviously knows the places where it is good to look. “But you can find them at every major construction site in the city.”
Problem: Construction sites are usually not freely accessible. “You should always ask first,” says the 43-year-old N-VA figurehead. “But luckily there are also places where that is not necessary.”
De Ridder takes us to the Ledeganckkaai on the New South. From next year, Antwerp residents will be able to walk through a city orchard there. There will also be an inground amphitheater. But for now, the ground is still fallow. During the fortification work a few years ago, a lot of soil was moved on that spot, exposing a ‘gigantic mass of fossils’. With a shovel and a sieve, the ships come here every now and then on a treasure hunt.
She quickly jumps over the wall that demarcates the street from the quay and shows her how she works. Just like the gold diggers in old cowboy movies, actually. Scoop, sieve and check. Today the loot is meager: shells and bone remains. “Just rubbish,” she laughs. The large millions of years old pieces are just there for the taking. “You have to be careful with that,” the ships say. “It wouldn’t be the first time you think it’s a piece of bone, grab you full of dog turd.” She smiles.
Speaking of turds. In her apartment, she shows us the 50-million-year-old faeces of a giant tortoise. “To be clear, I didn’t find that here in Antwerp”, says Annick De Ridder immediately. “This coprolite comes from Madagascar. I got it for my birthday from my cousins Noah and Lucca. They bought it at Steen en Been in the Volkstraat, one of my favorite shops in the city.” We can also feel. The petrified turtle turd is quite heavy. “In politics you get a lot of shit thrown at your head,” she says. “Just wait till I start throwing this shit.” She laughs heartily and then explains how they teach her nephews the joy of developing fossils. “Sometimes to the despair of their parents, who always have to wait for them on beach walks.”
The politician brings her eclectic fossil collection to the table. Here a mammoth tooth she bought, there a dolphin vertebra she found herself. There are glass jars with fish vertebrae, with ray teeth, with sickly warped biters. “I’m just an amateur,” she says half-finished. “I follow a number of groups where people like me post their finds. And every now and then I ask advice from people who know more about it than I do, such as Jan De Meulemeester (the journalist from Kanaal Z, who also presents himself on social media as the Minister of Fossils; ed.) by the Antwerp scientist Stéphane Knoll, who Neogene Sharks of Antwerp saved a famous book about his passion.”
It comes with a quip. “Our mayor may be inspired by the Romans. But the history of Antwerp goes back much further in time.”
The evidence is on her coffee table.