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45 Miles Out And 85 Feet Down


Shellseeker

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I am cleaning/sorting last seasons finds. :mellow: I went to my local fossil club last night and a friend was showing off a couple of boxes!!! of Megs, GWs, Makos, Hemis, Whale teeth, etc that he found last week. I am a sucker for color and took these photos of a Meg. There were likely 15-20 teeth that had this color combo, which I thought unusual for the Atlantic Ocean.

Note the benedini in the background.

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As I consider this, maybe he said "Four or Five" and I was concentrating on the Teeth and "heard" Fortyfive. I have gone out 15 miles and that is quite a distance in a boat.

Edited by Shellseeker

The White Queen  ".... in her youth she could believe "six impossible things before breakfast"

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The colors look like some of the Megs found in the Bone Valley formation. That is where I would rather look for them. Diving out 45 miles and 85 feet deep requires a lot of work, money, and equipment.

Edit: I do agree with you on the beauty of the color combo.

Edited by FLINTandBONE
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Those are some great teeth Jack but I have to say in Venice the diving is much easier : ) I can spend 6 hours down and it's a 15 minute ride back to the ramp

Every once in a great while it's not just a big rock down there!

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teeth this color are found off the NC coast. The megs are at or near the surface of the ocean floor and are black or gray with abundant epibionts. After the scooters flush the surface the deeper cleaner teeth including chubutensis (sp?) are exposed and have this coloration. This per an article in the North Carolina Fossil club newsletter by Jim Martin.

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Those are some great teeth Jack but I have to say in Venice the diving is much easier : ) I can spend 6 hours down and it's a 15 minute ride back to the ramp

6 hours down is a long time. How many tanks do you use or do you hookah?

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teeth this color are found off the NC coast. The megs are at or near the surface of the ocean floor and are black or gray with abundant epibionts. After the scooters flush the surface the deeper cleaner teeth including chubutensis (sp?) are exposed and have this coloration. This per an article in the North Carolina Fossil club newsletter by Jim Martin.

Thanks Plax,

This makes me wonder about the fossilization process. I have frequently thought of fossilization on land, where iron creates red or sulpher create yellow-green, etc. Do fossils form the same way under oceans?

The White Queen  ".... in her youth she could believe "six impossible things before breakfast"

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these fossils have only been exposed at the surface of the sea floor for 10 or 12 thousand years during our current interglacial period. The glacial periods are much longer and these fossils were nearly or actually exposed on land. They were of course originally deposited in the sea.

The Pungo River Formation teeth at Aurora had this same honey coloration despite being buried under many feet of younger sediment. Perhaps it was exposed near the surface before the Yorktown and subsequent formations were deposited? Shark tooth coloration is a complex thing. I've seen completely black cretaceous teeth turn white on the exposed side in the Woodbury Formation for instance. There are brown cretaceous teeth reworked in the base of the Eocene here in NC. These are in limestone. So chemistry is also a factor not just exposure.

Edited by Plax
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Jack,

Here is a few of the chubs I just got diving out there a couple weeks ago. Same colors. As plax said, any of the teeth I found visable on the surface were black, and all the ones that I fanned down to find were the brown color. All the species showed the same colors. (Hemis, megs, chubs, tigers).

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MH

"A man who asks is a fool for five minutes. A man who never asks is a fool for life".

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Gorgeous Teeth !!!

I had this discussion with my regular hunting partner who worked in the Bone Valley Phosphate mines for decades. He would describe uncovering areas that had thousands of yellow-green shark teeth and moving not more than 300 yards to where all the teeth were red-brown hues.

I have adjusted my thinking to where I now think that a shark tooth can fossilize to any of the different hues without ever being on dry ground... (i.e buried under the bottom of the sea floor)

The White Queen  ".... in her youth she could believe "six impossible things before breakfast"

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All it takes is soluble minerals, ground water, and time. :)

"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about." - Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

>Paleontology is an evolving science.

>May your wonders never cease!

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6 hours down is a long time. How many tanks do you use or do you hookah?

I'm a scuba guy, 4 al 80s :)

Every once in a great while it's not just a big rock down there!

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