Thursday, June 13, 2013

Looking for shark's teeth.

One of the items on our summer to do list was to go hunting for fossilized shark's teeth. Our local beaches aren't known for them (in fact, we've never found one) but just a bit south of us in Venice, well the beaches there are known to be the "shark teeth hunting capital of the world". So needless to say, we headed to Venice and the shores of Caspersen Beach for a little hunting.
 
When we arrived you could see that everyone was there for the same purpose..... to find teeth. People were hunched over scanning and sifting through the sand and shell (this beach is known for shelling too) looking for an intact tooth (fragments could be found everywhere). Some individuals were quite well equipped, while others like ourselves came with some dollar store implement, such as a kitchen strainer, to aid the search.
 
A few minutes into our hunting, Grace lost interest and decided that she had other plans. She was hopeful to catch a fish instead. So for our nearly four hour visit she hung around the rocky part of the coast with her net in hand searching for fish. Although the little fish were plentiful, they were a bit too quick and were spared a brief visit in the sand pail. Perhaps next time.
 




 
Our visit yielded about a dozen teeth. Most of them are tiny, as you can see from the picture of Grace's hand above, but they're fossilized shark teeth none the less. Perhaps next time we'll find a prized "big one" but until then we'll be perfectly content with the little ones!

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