I have a pretty sweet collection of megalodon teeth my grandfather found in the 80s. I found one myself as a kid, but it had one upper side busted. It was as big as my hand then, though.
There's some kind of sea-floor phenomenon that causes teeth to wash up on the beach in Venice, Florida, with a great regularity. 30 years ago, there were a lot more teeth.
Nowadays, scuba divers get most of them a couple hundred yards offshore at some underwater ledge, so they are more rare at the beach.
Do not collect ANY fossils you discover in Canada.
It is a serious federal offence.
There are specific exceptions but it is beyond the ability of the average person to be able to ensure compliance. What may appear to be an abundant and common deposit can in fact be one which is not part of the exceptions to the collection rules.
Yea we keep our heritage and land intact instead of letting every dickhead with a dream of getting rich rip our country apart and throw away our natural history just because they can't profit from it.
Speaking of Megalodons, you can go dig for their teeth in Bakersfield, California at Sharktooth Hill [1]. They're very common - you're all but guaranteed to find one after spending a few days at the quarry. They were even selling plots of land for $10k a few years back but I found out about it too late :(
Someday I hope to have enough to make a throne-like chair out of Megalodon teeth, sort of like the GoT throne made of iron swords.
Why are they common there? From a Google search, they are supposed to have 278 teeth. Make it 300 if you will. Given the time we've known for this place, I would assume that even if there were 10 megalodon sharks dead there, the 3000 teeth would be long gone! Is this a cemetery for sharks? Was there like a giant megalodon pond that went dry?
I'm no paleontologist but I believe the megalodon continuously shed and replaced their teeth like modern sharks. Some extant species are known to replace all of their teeth on a monthly basis so if the megalodon replaced them that fast, a single shark would produce thousands of teeth a year. For over fifteen million years.
Due to their shape and density, they were also more likely to quickly sink into sediment and avoid decomposition entirely. Then when the Pacific plate interacted with the North American plate, all of that ocean sediment was lifted up to form California.
They're actually relatively uncommon on the west coast compared to the East coast (the Carolinas especially). Sharktooth hill has lots more fossils of seals, sea lions, turtles, birds, whales, and other marine life.
I mean the megalodon specifically - likely a much bigger population lived in the Atlantic than the Pacific.
I think miscellaneous shark teeth are the most common fossil at Sharktooth Hill, they're just not as big or interesting as the megalodon teeth because they're difficult for a layman to age. Most megalodon teeth are obvious due to their size and most people are happy with a 5-25 Mya estimate.
I recently discovered that megalodon teeth are ubiquitous to the point of being fairly affordable (at least if you’re not very picky). Mind blowing that you can have something that’s a few million years old just sitting on your shelf to look at — seems like it could be a great reminder of how small and impermanent we are, in the grand scheme of things.
My cousin brought over his five year old recently and I showed the kid my small fossil collection. They thought I must have been rich but the most expensive piece was $50 and even then I knew I was over paying for it. I'm working on having one fossil from every geologic period.
As others have said, ebay is great as there are a lot of good fossil dealers. I personally got mine at a flea market, and talked the seller down to $20 for something he probably just picked up off the ground.
You're not building a museum so fractional specimens are the way to good. Teeth are a great place to start, they're ridiculously common (so affordable) and often of very little paleontological significance at this point (incredibly common). For fossil bones there, stuff like piece of Hadrosaurs that are again, so common they're of little significance.
For rounding out my collection of all the periods, I'm looking at fish and aquatic animals like trilobites.
pedantic but I suppose it's mind blowing to have something a few million of years old on your shelf that had DNA, otherwise pretty much any old rock would do
one notable realization in recent decades has been the role of thermophysiological differences among marine vertebrates that plays on their geographic and bathymetric distributions. For example, endothermic taxa can have higher cruising speeds that increase prey encounter rates as well as wider migration ranges compared to their ectothermic counterparts. In fact, endothermy, the ability to metabolically elevate and retain body heat over a broad ambient temperature range, is regarded to have an evolutionary merit as demonstrated by the fact that it evolved multiple times in vertebrate history.
Thermoregulation in organisms runs along a spectrum from endothermy to ectothermy. Endotherms create most of their heat via metabolic processes and are colloquially referred to as warm-blooded. When the surrounding temperatures are cold, endotherms increase metabolic heat production to keep their body temperature constant, thus making the internal body temperature of an endotherm more or less independent of the temperature of the environment. Endotherms possess a larger number of mitochondria per cell than ectotherms, enabling them to generate more heat by increasing the rate at which they metabolize fats and sugars.
Another common spot to easily find Megalodon and other large shark teeth is the Savannah River just past the shipping ports. The river dredging from a few years ago created a few new “islands” where shark teeth are plentiful.
There's some kind of sea-floor phenomenon that causes teeth to wash up on the beach in Venice, Florida, with a great regularity. 30 years ago, there were a lot more teeth.
Nowadays, scuba divers get most of them a couple hundred yards offshore at some underwater ledge, so they are more rare at the beach.
A great time to go is after a hurricane.