Booty
The finds started out slow and I was feeling frustrated, but then I chatted with a few people passing by, who told me they hadn't found nearly as much as usual, either. One guy who looked like he really knew what he was doing said to go find the "gravel" and search in there, that he'd found some decent-sized teeth. He said by the "boulders" was good, too, and he thought maybe the teeth were washing out of the boulders. "Boulders" = giant chunks of fallen clay, here.
So I made my way down the shoreline, checking around groups of clay boulders I ran across, and finally found some that had larger debris deposited near them, and that's where I found that nice big-ish flat tooth. It was actually just lying on plain wet sand, and appeared to have just washed up. After finding maybe three tiny teeth and a couple of shells prior, this was very exciting. That tooth measures 3/4" from root to tip.
A couple feet down I found the other large one, the long thin pointy one in the middle which is just slightly longer than the flat one.
The piece of whorled shell up at the top, leftish, is a piece of Ecphora garderae garderae Wilson, which I just now learned is Maryland's state fossil. I didn't know states HAD state fossils. I learned that and more on this webpage.
The big flat tooth belonged to a Snaggletooth Shark. No kidding. Hemipristis serra. The small red thing is a glass seed bead. I found one the last time I went, too, but thought nothing of it and threw it back. Then someone there told me about an old shipwreck in the 1700s that had lost these beads. I have no idea if that's true or not, but I found this one this time, searched just now, and found other mentions of this.
Booty
The finds started out slow and I was feeling frustrated, but then I chatted with a few people passing by, who told me they hadn't found nearly as much as usual, either. One guy who looked like he really knew what he was doing said to go find the "gravel" and search in there, that he'd found some decent-sized teeth. He said by the "boulders" was good, too, and he thought maybe the teeth were washing out of the boulders. "Boulders" = giant chunks of fallen clay, here.
So I made my way down the shoreline, checking around groups of clay boulders I ran across, and finally found some that had larger debris deposited near them, and that's where I found that nice big-ish flat tooth. It was actually just lying on plain wet sand, and appeared to have just washed up. After finding maybe three tiny teeth and a couple of shells prior, this was very exciting. That tooth measures 3/4" from root to tip.
A couple feet down I found the other large one, the long thin pointy one in the middle which is just slightly longer than the flat one.
The piece of whorled shell up at the top, leftish, is a piece of Ecphora garderae garderae Wilson, which I just now learned is Maryland's state fossil. I didn't know states HAD state fossils. I learned that and more on this webpage.
The big flat tooth belonged to a Snaggletooth Shark. No kidding. Hemipristis serra. The small red thing is a glass seed bead. I found one the last time I went, too, but thought nothing of it and threw it back. Then someone there told me about an old shipwreck in the 1700s that had lost these beads. I have no idea if that's true or not, but I found this one this time, searched just now, and found other mentions of this.