Megalodon at The Workshop

This past weekend I finally made it to a coffee shop I had been dying to visit down at Wrightsville Beach. The Workshop is unique because it showcases and sells a line of jewelry from "FossilEra." As you can guess from this image, the collection is made up of various shark tooth necklaces ranging from the smaller Sandbar and Benedini to the massive (and extinct) Megalodon, one of which is pictured here (isn't it beautiful?!). As a coffee lover and shark enthusiast, I did not actually purchase this necklace for the sake of this assignment. However, while I was admiring this tooth I realized that the discoloration came not from human tampering like I initially thought (their own preservation tools perhaps), but from the natural fossilization process I realized I knew very little about. After doing a bit of research, I found that these fossilized teeth exist because of many ecological interactions. Sharks lose thousands of teeth in their lifetime and in order for them to become fossilized they must rather quickly be covered by sediment on the ocean floor. This covering protects the tooth from decaying due to limiting oxygen and bacterial exposure. This specific preservation is called "permineralization." Water seeps through the sediment and into pore spaces in the tooth, primarily calcite and silica, that preserve and fossilize the tooth as well as cause discoloration ranging from blacks and greys to reds and oranges. It turns out there is a natural response for pretty much everything!

 

Information gathered from www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/discover/sharks/fossil-sharks/foss...

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