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I had a good weekend on the river this past Saturday and Sunday. I did some fishing and scouting for new dig spots. I have yet to find my own place where 1. no one else knows/digs that I am networked with 2. that produces decent quality and OK quantity. Saturday evening that was checked off from my fossil hunting bucket list, though. I plugged down the river in my lil 14' jon boat, saw some shells atop a bank that looked familiar to the fossil pecten in edgecomb county and made a quick dash to the shore! I had quite the struggle among the brush and trees between myself and these barely visible shells - but I made it, grabbed a very nice C. madisonius with some little barnacles atop of it. As I'm climbing down I spot something embedded in the rock/hardened clay and got so excited I literally laughed out loud. MEGLADON TOOTH! -This I was not expecting, but welcomed! I pried it out, really neat color and sadly chipped away about a third - but still in good condition and a promising sign as I looked around and also found two beautiful little great whites almost pearly white! Such unique colored teeth for this part of eastern NC as normally my finds, like GMR, are darker grays and blacks and then you have the aurora teeth and hour east that these appeared more like in color but still different. I would love to know the minerals responsible for this coloration here. Anyhow, I returned with my Good digging partner, Rick, Sunday and we found a few more things that were alright. More to explore - more to come I'm sure!

Had a phenomenal trip down at Calvert Cliffs on Wednesday with my three month old daughter strapped to my chest. This trip makes up for my failed attempts in March where the sandbars where at an all time high and made it difficult to find anything. The sandbars pushed up from the storms a few months back even helped me to get to some hard to reach locations. Here's some finds and a scouting report for May of the cliffs. Also recovered a nearly perfect decently sized Ecphora gardenae that is still undergoing some preparation work. I'll take a picture of that and post it later along with some very large clams with Ecphora burrow holes. The blood red Mako as found in the sand. I rarely sift as the waves and storms (from the weekend) are constantly exposing the fossil record. Some of the nicer specimens of the day. Two makos on the left, snaggletooth bottom right and top middle. Cow shark with eight blades top right, and a decent sized tiger shark top middle. Recovered more Chesapecten nefrens that I could carry out. This is just a fragment of the shells recovered and layed out neatly in the trunk of my car. Some of the C. nefrens where about 5-6 inches in diameter and impressive to find intact as there were so many large shell fragments. These should make for some beautiful display pieces and gifts once they are cleaned up. Notice the right fins of the C. nefrens are larger than the left fins. This is a noticeable characteristic of this fossil scallop. Approaching the cliffs. The tides where up much higher this time but the waves where very gentle. This photo was taken around 7:00 am. The vegetation overgrowth should help to keep the cliffs from falling. Another shot of the blood red mako. I'll take a closeup of the other Mako later as it's a green-yellow cream color. Somebody found this stranded snapper turtle and carried him 3 miles back up to a freshwater pond. What a nice guy and what a cool looking turtle. A bunch of teeth, turritella, shark vertebrae, ray plates, makos, sand tiger, tiger, requiem, ecphora gardenae, crab claw tip, Megalodon root, and snaggletooth teeth collected by a local collector and myself combined from this trip and a recent trip. Matoaka cabins beach shore. The winds here were very strong and kicked up a lot of dust with some impressive waves. I had to protect my newborn in my chest as I braved the winds. Image 8: Female blue crab that appears to have deposited her eggs and passed away to be washed up on the shore. This is a good sign that the bay is recovering from over-crabbing. Crabs are vital to the bay's overall health as they are scavengers and eat decaying fish and other decomposing critters on the bottom of the bay. Male blue crab. You can tell it's a male by the "state capitol" on the underside. Perhaps his mate was the female that just layed her eggs.

I found this his big tiger shark tooth at a local rock shop today. The tag says Eocene but no location info is provided and the store worker had no idea. It looks modern, but the enamel has chipped back a bit as if fossilized. Was wondering what you guys thought? cheers!

Long time lurker, first time poster. Here are a few pics from my hunt last week at the cliffs. Normally hunt in between plum point and dares beach. This time I Came away with a nice meg, a big broken meg and my first symphseal cow shark tooth! I just started colecting this past summer and normally get out one or two times a week. Also, I just got a jet ski so I look forward to being able to get to some spots that aren't accessible by land.

First of all thank you for the join and all the info already published! I've been obsessed with sharks since I was a kid and naturally loved shark teeth. My family that used to visit Florida would always give me some as I grew up and I talked my parents into getting me a meglodon tooth. As of today I went on my first adventure and found me a vertebrae behind the YMCA baseball/soccer fields in Summerville. Seems to be the only concrete directions to a place I can find on google. Unfortunately I am only temporarily here and a full blown rookie. I am here for C17 school at Charleston afb and will be returning to the north east (Jersey) mid December. Was wondering where some other areas I may venture to legally and have some luck? Also I'd love to join anyone that is interested in having me along. I have a car and willing to travel (even pick you up). I plan on trying out coosaw creek by a church tomorrow after school. Just reply here or message me if you'd like to join me or let me join you. Thanks - Paul

Well, I sure feel like a nitwit! Remember this topic I made, about how it's wise not to throw away your supposedly-fake fossil, because even the experts can get it wrong? > http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/57593-this-is-why-you-shouldnt-discard-your-fossils-even-if-they-are-supposedly-fake/ Guess what? You guys were right all along - It IS a fake, or at least, the root is. So for 2 years I've been trying to ID the tooth. It looks like the crown of a croc, yet has a full root. I asked the seller, but he was adamant it was a real tooth. I checked with several other experts, and a taxidermist. After handling it, all confirmed my tooth and root was real. Hence, despite Thomas Kapitany, Nate Curtis and you guys telling me otherwise, I was convinced mine was real. Still, I just couldn't lock it down to a species. Was it tiger? Croc? Pinniped? Whale? Then a group of big cat fans messaged me, asking for info on my tooth, e.g. weight, length... They did a lot of calculations, cross-section fitting of my tooth into tiger jaws etc, and came to the conclusion mine was the fabled lost canine of the Ngandong Tiger. As a collector, I was more than happy to accept that ID. For months, I was happily ignorant. But I couldn't ignore my nagging suspicions this tooth isn't what it appears to be. I went online to search, and what do you know? I found 6 other Java teeth like mine, all ID-ed as tiger. I have 2 teeth, and my friend has 3, that means all 11 of these teeth that are known online are fully-rooted. Let that sink in a moment. Fully-rooted teeth are rare in the fossil record, and now 11 out of 11 have that? Not likely at all. I tried looking for instances with partial roots, or broken ones but there were none. Here's an album compilation of the 11 teeth > http://imgur.com/a/hhWcC As it turns out, the Javanese really like tiger. I found 4 Indonesian seller marketing croc teeth as tiger ones. Thomas Kapitany also revealed to me they've been faking fossils for decades. I broke my smaller tooth apart, this is what I saw > http://imgur.com/a/4F8iJ Let me say first the Javanese are darn good at faking this. I thought I knew plenty about Moroccan and Chinese fake fossils, but this one just threw me off utterly. I will relabel my smaller tooth crown as a croc, and the big one will stay as it is - a reminder to myself to be neutral when it comes to ID-ing a fossil; I was so biased towards tiger that I failed to see all the red flags. Too often, the problem many of us is that a collector refuses to acknowledge when he has a misidentified fossils (e.g. a concretion instead of an egg, rugosa coral instead of teeth). I happened to be one of them. Sometimes, the experts really do know better

This is a small shark tooth, found today (on an organised fossil hunt) near Govce, Slovenia, of early Miocene age. There was some discussing about what species it belonged to, and there are two possibilities: either Hemipristis serra or Galeocerdo aduncus. I'm not sure as I'm no expert on shark teeth, but either of these two IDs would make it a very cool tooth, since these are very rare here. You can usually find plenty of small mako teeth there, but other shark species are very rare.

So I doodled on down to Aurora on Friday (8/31/12). My parents had come to visit and since I'm always yammering about fossils I decided to show them what it was all about. They loved it. My mom's first outting produced a Carcharocles angustidens tooth with the corner broken off, a nice lil modern mako and a cow shark lower (Notorrhynchus primigenius). I found my first dolphin tooth, first squalodon tooth and a nice modern tiger. In all reality, I think I had a hemipristis magnet on me! LOL! My dad did well. Finding all kinds of various teeth and some nice shark vert disks. He also found a very tiny dolphin tooth and my husband as well. Hubby found a Catticus to boot. And we both found a couple little thresher teeth which according to the museum director have gotten scarce there. He found a nice pathalogical tooth that appears to be sand tiger. I found a nice fish vert and some sand tigers that looked perfect (until I pulled them out of the dirt). We all know how that goes!!! I love the little stuff too. I found the tiniest sand tiger in my collection and it is nearly perfect! And, the smallest hemipristis I've ever come across. And of course as always a handful of the copper, smooth hammerhead, lemon, silky shark teeth. As well as a couple bull shark teeth. I did find a stumper. It looks like a sharpnosed tooth (Rhizoprionodon sp.) but the front of the tooth has huge "horns" coming from the root, throwing me off. And I ran into MikeDOTB. It was a pleasure and I have to say THANKS AGAIN MIKE!!!! Well I will post a few pictures now!

Good evening! I've been going through and reasearching some of my summer trip finds this year and I am hoping for a little help! I am trying to figure out what the teeth in this picture are. This website has been incredibly helpful and has provided me with some think I knows but a few of them have me really stumped. They were all collected in Virginia and North Carolina. PLease feel free to correct my educated guesses. The larger teeth have smooth edges. The only one that has some seration is the small, wider one at the bottom-middle of the picture. If you need any close up picture I can certainly provide those as well. I thought the ones on the left were sand tigers but because of the shorter, wider root and "fatness" of the dentin I am considering otherwise. Plus they are not flat with the little upturn toward the end that I always distinguish with sand tigers. I have no clue what the ones with the dark greyish and brownish grey coloring are. (This would be the one closest to the 2" mark and his friends the left at 9 and 10 o'clock. Everyone's help is GREATLY appreciated!!! Thanks again and happy hunting!! Joyce