Search the Community

Great hunt today, left with a hand full of nice teeth, the best being my Chub and my dolphin teeth

Wish I was there https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/underwater-fossil-hunting.htm

Hi. In addition to going to Big Brook this week I was fortunate to get to Matoaka beach for the first time. Did not do as well but it was still had a blast. Hunted with @Searcher78 who always seems to find the nicest tiger shark teeth. I did find my first stingray barb though. Enjoy the pics.

Hi. Took my bi-weekly trip to Big Brook this week. Had the whole place to myself again. It was not to cold. Enjoy the the pics. Any feedback is always greatly appreciated Mark Scapanorhynchus Texanus Squalicorax Kaupi top row- Archaeolamna kopingensis middle- Carcharias Samhammeri Bottom row- sawfish Ischyrhiza Mira Cretolamna Appendiculata I’m assuming modern bone because I’m not that lucky this pic is the bottom of the above picture bottom right. Not sure if it is anything Found a black m&m. Oh the humor. I don’t think everything below are concretions but just want to make sure before I toss it.

Searched matoaka beach today. Lots of shells, but I don’t collect them. Not as much luck as Brownies, but not bad. I believe that I got my first fish tooth.

Found at Abbey wood. Sand shark?

Me and a friend spent a couple hour searching and a little sifting and left with over 100 teeth! Here are the best from the trip, a couple of makos, a hand full of nice tigers, two bronze whaler?, two cow sharks, and a baby posterior megalodon tooth!

Hello, I have been doing some fossil hunting at Bay Front Park (Chesapeake Beach) -Brownies- in Maryland USA and have been trying to group and identify some of the teeth I found. I believe these teeth are Miocene and my guesses are as follows- what do you think? Thanks Row 1: Physogaleus contortus Row 2: Galeocerdo aduncus Row 3: Hemipristis serra

Hey, I am Jammie. I live in North Carolina but we have a beach house in Myrtle Beach. We go about 3 weekends a month. Currently my only fossil hunting has been walking up and down the beach but I am so hooked on it!!! I WANT MORE! I want to learn how and where to search for fossils other than the beach. I want to learn all I can about everything I find. I love hearing all the adventures and stories of others. #Fossilsforever

Greetings, I am an amateur fossil collector and rock hound and I don’t know too much about fossil species or how to identify them... My dad recently gave me some of his shark teeth he found in the 90s at his coworkers ranch. He never bothered to identify them so I’m hoping to get some help with that, thank you! He showed me the area on a map and told me about the rock types and I’ve come to the conclusion that they were found somewhere in between the Carlisle shale and the Niobrara Formation, though I could be mistaken. The area he found them at is southeast of Colorado Springs on private land. I will post pictures below, help of any kind is appreciated!

Some of us will do anything to sit and sift for shark teeth, ray teeth and fossils. Temp was good today 1-20-2020 so I headed to Mulberry Phosphate Museum. Some of us are older and not in the best of health so we go where we can to enjoy the hunt! Its a great place to meet families with kids and talk about hunting and more. I had just mentioned to one of the Mothers how great it would be if the Phosphate Mine would bring some larger teeth and such and mix in with the small rocks, reason is the rocks and all through a crusher and are all small so many shark teeth are very small and others are broken as you see in my finds today. An older Gentleman walked up by the name of James and he had with him a bag or large and small shark teeth, come to find out, he use to work for the mines. He comes to the rock pile and hides some larger ones for the people to find. Today he gave me and 2 of the young boys some great ones! They are not in the picture. Something to think about, if anyone has places disabled people can go and hunt it would be a great add on to this site. So many of us still enjoy the hunt but are not able to do a lot of walking and bending. Just a thought. Blessings when you hunt! Deb

Hi all! I am planning on taking my 3rd fossil collecting trip to Florida next week. I had an amazing time in previous trips and am planning one that will be a bit longer! I plan on collecting in Gainesville at Hogtown Creek (my first time) and the Peace River, where I will be kayaking and camping a good stretch of it over the course of 2 or 3 days. I have my own gear and kayak, but will reach out to canoe outpost for their services in the drop off up river. It is 5 degrees in Chicago today and i am excitedly spending my week over-planning the trip. I have a few questions I’d love some feedback on from this who are more familiar with the area. For 2-3 days where would you recommend to launch the kayak at on the Peace River? And are camp spots easy to find along the way? I’ve floated between the Gardner and Brownsville boat ramps before, but looking to extend that type of trip, i really enjoyed it. What other areas should I look to collect around Gainesville? Are there any other rivers I should look into? My timeline is flexible I’ve read a bit into the Suwannee River, is that worth a stop? And any advice on prospecting or collecting there? Also, where is your top-secret spot where I can find the mammoth teeth and 5’’+ megs? (Feel free to pm this info ) If anyone is interested in joining me (tentatively Jan 25-29), I would love to connect and collect together! Below are pics where I camped at a couple years back (Brownsville) and some of my finds in the area.

I have been slacking in my posts the past couple of trips, so I figured I would catch up. First up are carboniferous plant fossils from McIntyre Mountain, PA:

Went to Brownies for the first time Wednesday. Met up with @searcher78 and had a good time looking stuff. It is completely different then what we have in Jersey. The cliffs are really amazing. Enjoy the pics. Appreciate any feedback on the pics. Thanks as always. what could have been a nice Mako my first hemis ever! front and back of what I think is a piece of cow shark?

Found this forum looking for new places to fossil hunt because Google anything fossil and you end up here any way so figured I join

It was a nice day for shark tooth hunting with another TFF member. I was hoping for larger teeth, but it was mostly small teeth.

Hey I recently went to The Aurora fossil museum and found quite a few shark teeth, I was wondering if anyone could help identify these small teeth, they are all about 1/4 of an inch or so. I can get better pictures if necessary! Thank you!

A couple hours of sifting and surface collecting, found a nice Mako, a couple Snaggeltooth and a handful of small teeth. Also came away with a small porpoise tooth and porpoise rib, vertebrae, and Epiphysis disk fragments.

Nice day for another hunt. Fish bones and a small crocodile tooth.

Stopped at Flag Pond today since the weather is nice.

Happy new year! I had a very relaxing and enjoyable 30 degree day in the creek yesterday. Tried out my my first pair chest waders yesterday and they where awesome. Anyway I feel like I had a decent haul. Last time I went out I almost threw out a hybodont fin spike. Thankfully I posted a picture before I did anything. It caused me though to think everything was something yesterday. There I’m going to make a separate post of some items I’m not sure of. Enjoy the pics. Any thoughts on I’d would be greatly appciated. Squalicotax kaupi Squalicorax pristodontus

I have done this periodically on the forum with quite a bit of success so I thought we would try it again. I am working on going deeper into shark evolution in our programs and expanding the range of sharks we cover by a few million years. We are set with our Cenozoic and Mesozoic sharks but we are still tinkering with the Paleozoic sharks. Currently the goal is extending the timeline backward and covering the very early sharks. Our earliest shark fossils were 340 million years old but we have been able to find a few that are older and really help us but I am wondering if we can find more. We recently acquired some Chondrichthyes scales from the Harding Sandstone. While likely not "true" shark scales, they are a link in the chain which is what we need. I think this was a good starting point. We also picked up a Diplacanthus fossil from Scotland which gives us a nice example of what the ancestors of sharks were and again provides us with another link in the chain. Carter and I both thought these were fossils we needed to add to really show the kids shark evolution through the fossils. We also picked up some micro fossils from the Genudewa Limestone of New York which should provide some interesting shark material. This formation is the same age (Givetian) and same general location (New York) as the formation that Wellerodus is described from. There are teeth and denticles that are at least superficially pretty close to those of Wellerodus. This is probably our best shot at finding shark fossils that could potentially be from Antarticlamnidae. I know there are also teeth found in these micros that look Cladodont in nature as well. Outside of these micro fossils, I am coming up blank on Devonian shark fossils. I have been researching the heck out of Paleozoic sharks and I know the Devonian stuff is rare but I have seen a little bit in collections so in my mind it might be possible to add a tooth or some denticles from other formations. Obviously we are not looking for a full shark fossil from the Cleveland Shale or anything like that but I believe we can scrounge up some additional fossils from the Devonian. None of my usual sources have turned up any material at all so we need a push start here lol So TFF friends, share your knowledge with us if you can. What, if any, options are there as far as Devonian shark teeth or denticles that appear on the market ? Are there formations that we should look into that people collect from? Basically any information that we can get might be helpful. The goal is filling in that timeline of sharks and we have a bunch of shark programs this winter and spring so this is the collecting priority for us. Thank you in advance for any and all replies !

So I recently made a post showing some of the teeth I pulled from the Peace River over the holiday break at the end of 2019 ( link below ). I love Megalodon teeth with a passion. Like many other hunters, they are my goal when I go out fossil hunting. I have found though that river teeth are much more fragile and lighter than most land found teeth. I'm not sure if that is due to properties in the water. Maybe over time the rivers wash away some of the minerals in the teeth making them more fragile and worn down. Either way after my 3 day river hunt I was happy with the haul of Meg teeth that I had found but only 2 out of the 29 teeth I found made it to the keep pile. The rest hit the broken bin for later projects. Feeling dissatisfied with the quality of my finds I set out for one more day of hunting. Christmas day was perfect. The weather was nice and I had a new land site in mind that I wanted to explore. So I left early in the morning so that I could explore as much as possible for the whole day. After about an hour hike I came across this vein of rock that looked to be a layer of fossils. I mostly found worn down Dugong bones and fragments but I knew that meant Megalodon was not far behind. After about 20 minutes of searching this area I found my first tooth I have learned from hunting land sites how easy it is to stay in one spot once you find one tooth. You think "oh this area is so large I should stay here and hunt. If I found one, there are more here." But land sites I have found are not like the rivers. Fossils don't collect in one spot like they do in moving water. So I chose to explore more of the new area so that I wouldn't miss out on other finds. After 6 hours of finding nothing but one more broken meg and a few small teeth, I chose to loop back to my first and only good spot of the day to search it for one more hour before heading home. I chose to take my time in this spot and really look at the gravel and dirt. I had found one good tooth in this area so there must be others. However what I thought was an untouched area turned out to not be. While in my last hours of hunting time I spotted two other hunters staring at the ground just like me on the top of a hill. Little did they know I had already looked at the area they were searching. I lost some faith that I would find much in this area now knowing that other people already knew about this spot and were hitting it, however I still searched for a while. I think it's fair to say that when land hunting most fossil hunters including myself only surface collect. It's too hot and time consuming to dig in one spot looking for teeth. It's much better to let mother nature wash them from the sand and gravel as it rains. Seeing that this area had been hunted before I realized why I was not seeing many teeth on the surface of these gravel piles. Either way I used my last hour well, looking in the cracks and water run off areas in the hills where teeth would collect as they get washed out and then all of a sudden I spotted a very exciting looking rock poking out of the side wall of one of these erosion points. I dug around the rock and to my surprise and excitement it was exactly what I was hoping for. A fully intact and untouched Megalodon tooth. Out of all of my Bone Valley teeth I have only ever found one that I would consider almost perfect. It has all of the serrations and a fully intact root with a beautiful marbled grey and blue coloration. However like most Bone Valley teeth it has a tip ding. That is part of Bone Valley though since it was a baby Meg Nursery full of food to crunch their teeth on. So when this new tooth came out of the sand on Christmas day it was the perfect gift for all those hours out on the hunt. It is fully intact with only some small feeding damage on the top right side of the tooth, it even has the tip!! This tooth measures 4.25 inches, making it now my biggest and most complete tooth yet. I am so happy with this find. However it dried sort of dark greenish brown so I am thinking of setting it out in the sun to let it lighten up. The part that had been exposed to the sun is really nice and white so maybe more sun will bring out those nice colors. Let me know if you think that is a good idea or not. Here's a link to the river hunt I posted the other day.

It had been a while since my last good fossil hunting trip so I was very excited to have free time over most of December. I had three free days the week before Christmas and I made use of everyone of them. The first day I went out with the goal of trying new areas that I had not tried before, so I spent most of day one trying new locations and coming up with only one good spot that produced some nice smaller teeth but nothing too amazing shark tooth wise. I did however find my first Tapir tooth but the root structure was missing. The next day out was spent mostly adventuring through other new areas with little luck except for right at the end of the day when I found my first 3 whole Meg teeth of the trip. I came across a large gravel deposit with large rocks mixed into the pile. I scanned over the gravel pile to see if I could surface spot a tooth and sure enough down in the water was this staring back at me. These finds are the reason I decided to make the 2 hour drive for a third time that week. I was already very tired from 2 full days of hunting with little luck but finding 3 nice teeth right at the end of the second day made me want to explore this new area even more. So I headed out for a third time and made it a goal to only hunt this new section of river. I was not disappointed by my choice to go out again. I had planned to only go for half the day as my legs were chaffed from the waders from days 1 and 2 but the spot I was in was too amazing to leave early. I found a nice honey hole within the first 2 hours out and decided to try a few other spots with little luck. I decided to just dig the honey hole for the rest of the day and its surrounding areas. The teeth that came out of this spot were amazing. Meg after Meg piece came out of this hole. In one of my last few screens came my collection heart breaker. The big tooth pictured below measures 4.25 inches as is from the highest edge to the tip. It's a shame that this tooth was so beat up but at least it was mother nature that did the damage and not me. I also found what I think is a Bison tooth right next to the Meg I found by sight in the water. Correct me if I am wrong, I'm not sure on my identification. (PS: I screen shot my river pics because I am not sure if the forum removes meta data from the photos before adding them to a post.)

Got all these shark teeth for Christmas, are they all sand shark?