and to think the one on the lower left is from an average animal coins if yah cant tell are half dollars....

those aren't local finds are they Rattler?

Got a bunch of those. I've forgotten which species they re, but I used to know most of them. Mine are from a quarry in South Carolina and are slightly radioactive. Not something to hang around one's neck.

no.....as far as fossils go fairly young.....the three meg teeth are atleast 1.5 million years old....last saltwater left here 60 million years ago give or take....these are from someone dredging a river in Florida....

Give big boat and strong wire, and village eat fish for dinner for long time!

--Zog (KG's ancestor from way, way, waaaaaaay back)

Very cool collection. A buddy of mine takes his kid down to FL's west coast and dredges sand (from the ditch out past the first breakers he explains). He boxes up a couple 5 gallon buckets and they spend winter nights straining sand for shark teeth a few cups at a time. He says they get on average at least 20 per bucket. Pretty cool.


Brent, how did some get radioactive?

im guessing he pulled them put of a phosphate deposit.....phosphorous has a couple radioactive isotopes....

some other fossils from the same jumbled river deposit the shark teeth mostly came from...

to the left are crocodilian and sea mammal teeth.....upper right circles are shark vertebrae....triangular ones to the right are either barracuda or tuna teeth.....big thing on the bottom center is a whale ear bone and square things above it are horse molars, think i have both modern and three toe horse molars, not sure if i got both in the pic....need to do more research...

Hey - those are pretty cool! I work at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Md., and am pretty well versed in finding and identifying Miocene fossils.I'm pretty sure there is little evidence of Meg after about 2.5 million years ago... North Carolina and Fla would be just about that time. Sharks reached their apex in size at that time.

Mine came from a kaolin quarry. The teeth along with saltwater croc teeth, toothed whale bones and teeth, sea turtle shell, and a whole lot of sediment slid into this trench 60 mya and collected on top of what was, or would become kaolin. Apparently, lots and lots of various naturally occurring radioactive compounds would collect there as well.

The mine would let folks come in on Sundays and pick over an area that had been scraped clean of overburden prior to the next week's blasting and removal of kaolin. Small "lenses" of greenish clay would remain a few inches deep in depressions on the kaolin that the dozers scraped over. We would peal those back by hand the the big teeth and whale bone would be just lying there, shiny as a new penny.

Anyway, a guy that work on the bomb plant in Aiken where we were doing field work was out there often and took us out there. His work dosimeter pegged out one day and the entire lab went a little bonkers wondering where it was coming from because there was lots of radioisotopes in the various labs. It took a while before they eliminated everything and then they went to his trails and Geiger counters went nuts. His place was like a museum of fossils from this place and it was all hot. And from there, the found out that lots of university and other museums were full of hot fossils too. Apparently, it's pretty common and low-grade stuff, but just not something to put on a chain around your neck every day on in your pocket or under your pillow.

I have mine framed behind glass on my office wall where they are safe enough. So, now I take a little bit of care around fossils from anywhere, but especially from places in the SE USA.

One of the cooler things was an abundance of whale otoliths as big as my fist.

thanks for the bit of info.....grew up and live on the Hell Creek formation so been looking for fossils since i could walk....my brother got to spend a week help digging up Peck's Rex:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peck's_Rex

every so often i find someone selling a box of fossils or rocks or whatever and within the last few months prolly got 5 pounds worth of stuff out of Florida from a guy......while im pretty familiar with how the deposits are laid out in eastern Montana i have yet to spend much time learning the ages of stuff in Florid where these came out of....

the big Meg tooth is prolly my favorite fossil but ive got something thats prolly neater, have a small chunk of petrified wood from a permian formation in Texas where instead of lots of silica replacing the wood its been replaced by copper based minerals....

Hey, that's way cool, B. Thanks for the info.