Four Places to Find Fossilized Shark Teeth in the United States

Shark teeth are often considered the most common vertebrate fossils in the world, and for good reason. Each individual shark has rows upon rows of chompers that fall out and get replaced in conveyor belt-like fashion. A single shark can lose approximately one tooth per week.

Considering the fact that sharks have swum the world’s seas for more than 400 million years, the animals have left behind an extensive fossil record. Today, their preserved teeth, which tend to have a dark color, can be found in the sediments of rivers, along coastlines or even on the side of the road, depending on where you are.

“If you can find one in one location, you will certainly find more,” says Fred Mazza, president of the fossil tour company Paleo Discoveries in Florida. “They’re not all large, large teeth. A lot of them just naturally fall into a size range from half an inch to one inch. But they’re not rare to find at all.”

Teeth are the only widely available record of prehistoric sharks, since the cartilaginous bodies of the predatory fish do not preserve easily. If scientists want to learn about the sharks’ anatomy, diet or ecology, they have to get clues from teeth.

Sora Kim, a geochemist and shark tooth researcher at the University of California, Merced, studies the chemical elements in fossilized shark teeth to unravel some of the mysteries about the life history of these animals. Last year, her team reported a shocking discovery: that the megalodon, the giant extinct shark considered to be the largest fish that ever lived, may have been warm-blooded like mammals.

Today, more than one-third of shark and ray species are threatened with extinction, largely due to overfishing. But climate change is another threat—a study published this month found sharks are abandoning stressed coral reefs as oceans warm.

According to Kim, studying sharks of the past could provide clues to how modern sharks will fare under climate change. During the Eocene epoch (roughly 33.9 million to 56 million years ago), oceans also warmed, and it’s often used as an analogue for what’s happening today. “How did the sharks cope?” she says. “How did they make it through mass extinction events, or climate warming or climate cooling? I think that fossil shark teeth, they’ve recorded all that information. And we’re just now developing the tools to be able to unlock that box.”

If you’re planning to collect fossil shark teeth, experts recommend keeping a few guidelines in mind. First, don’t collect on private land without permission—never trespass in order to find fossils. You also can’t collect fossils from national parks without a research permit.

Additionally, Kim urges fossil hunters to consider donating their finds to museums, where they could help spur scientific discoveries. Having citizen scientists collect teeth can save researchers precious money, time and labor from field expeditions. And often, in shark tooth research, it’s a bit of a numbers game—the more teeth a scientist can examine, the more information they have to work with, elevating the quality of their data.

“I think that shark paleoecology is kind of on this cusp of doing all these great things,” Kim says. “We need to be able to analyze teeth—either their shape, or their chemistry, or just counting the number of teeth and things like that—to be able to get a better sense of what taxa lived where, what they were doing, how they were interacting. And by having these teeth in private collections, that’s taking out some of that data.”

If you intend to donate your collections, Kim recommends sorting teeth in different jars or boxes based on where they were found. Contact a local natural history museum or university, which might have a paleontology collection, and it may have a use for the finds or direct you to a larger institution.

Picking up fossils is also a hands-on way to connect with Earth’s distant past. And hunting for shark teeth offers an educational, entertaining activity for you or your family.

“Man, I could shoot a whole day on it,” says Jim Cotter, a geologist at the University of Minnesota Morris. As a researcher of glacial geology, Cotter often comes in contact with Cretaceous deposits and shark teeth and communicates with the public about sharks.

Here’s how, in many areas of the country, you can roll up your sleeves—or your pants legs—and find some prehistoric shark tooth fossils, with a bit of luck.

Southwest Florida

Mazza, of Paleo Discoveries, leads fossil-hunting tours in the Peace River of southwest Florida, roughly an hour east of Sarasota. He’ll take a group of shark tooth-spotting hopefuls out in canoes, and then they’ll leave the boats and wade into the water. Using shovels, they’ll dredge up sediment, then sift through it with a floating screen.

“The Peace River tends to be fairly shallow, and there are beds of phosphate gravel,” Mazza says. “And where phosphate gravel is found, you will find marine fossils.”

Florida used to be entirely underwater during the Eocene and the Age of Dinosaurs. As a result, no dinosaur fossils have ever been found in the state. But it’s a prime place for fossils of aquatic creatures. The Peace River, for one, is “really loaded” with shark teeth, Mazza adds, from tiger, bull, lemon, gray and snaggletooth sharks to the megalodon.

Individual fossil hunters can bring a sieve or colander to the coast to help sift through sediment. The region’s acclaimed sites for fossil hunting include Venice, Florida, which is branded as the “Shark Tooth Capital of the World.” Playing into the fossils’ appeal to tourists, Venice hosts an annual Sharks Tooth Festival. Other beaches in and around Sarasota County are also prime shark tooth sites, such as Caspersen Beach.

“For the larger megalodon teeth, a lot of divers focus on … Venice Beach off the Florida coast, because there were just more large megalodons living there for a longer period of time,” Mazza says.

Chesapeake Bay

Millions of years ago, parts of the Mid-Atlantic states surrounding the Chesapeake Bay were submerged beneath a warm, shallow sea. Miocene sharks flocked to the area to feast on aquatic plants and algae, and their fossilized teeth provide a record of their presence.

One well-known location for fossil hunting is the Calvert Cliffs of Maryland, located in Calvert County. There, shark teeth can be found along the shore near exposed cliff sides that stand some 100 feet tall beside a narrow beach. As wind and water erode the cliff face, prehistoric fossils emerge. Today, however, walking near the cliff is off-limits for safety reasons, but you can access a public beach nearby.

“The waves undercut the cliffs, and the cliffs erode, sometimes in very large blocks of many tons,” Mazza says. “And if the cliff gets eroded with a lot of high-water action—because [of] a lot of wind or a storm—it can cause the cliffs to collapse in blocks, and then the waves break the blocks down, and the fossils will turn up in the surf eventually, or in the blocks on the beach.”

If you want to try some slightly lesser-known locations, check out sites such as Maryland’s Flag Ponds Nature Park and Nanjemoy Wildlife Management Area or Virginia’s Westmoreland State Park. Find a spot along the parks’ beaches on the Chesapeake Bay or Potomac River and sift through sand at the shoreline or wade out a little bit and look through the sediment there. Just remember that fossil hunting can take some luck, and it might not always be a fruitful day.

Atlantic Coast

The Mid-Atlantic isn’t the only spot on the East Coast where fossil shark teeth can be found—the remains appear across a large stretch of that shore. “At certain points, the east side of the U.S. was part of the coastal plain; it was flooded, because the ocean level was higher,” Mazza says. “It was globally a warmer time. And when that happens, the ocean rises. … So you can find shark teeth of similar age up and down the East Coast.”

Compared to the Miocene fossils that Mazza finds in Florida, shark teeth along much of the Atlantic Coast tend to be older. In some states, he says, keen collectors could potentially find teeth from the ancestors of the megalodon.

Many states along the coast have sites where you can find shark teeth. Here, the same guidelines apply: Using a colander or sieve—or just your hands—search through the sediment at the shoreline. Mazza advises looking on the beach just above where the waves break, or snorkeling or diving offshore. Some fossil hunters look at low tide, others at high tide. “All methods work,” Mazza writes in an email.

Along the James River in Virginia, some state parks will lead fossil-related events. North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Holden Beach and Topsail Island rank as popular locations to search. In South Carolina, the Charleston area is a common spot for fossil collecting, with the nearby Folly Beach offering shark teeth. In Georgia, a megalodon tooth is the state fossil.

“Any one of those areas from any of those states can be a gold mine if you know where to look,” Mazza says.

Central United States

The central U.S. might not seem like a shark tooth hot spot—it doesn’t even touch an ocean. But during the Cretaceous period, North America was cut in half by an inland sea that passed over that region, and varied sharks inhabited it.

Called the Western Interior Seaway, the body of water was formed by plate tectonics. “As a result, you start to get uplift in the West—not yet the Rockies, but beginnings of uplift,” says Cotter, the University of Minnesota Morris geologist. “And as that happens, the West kind of flexes up, and the Midwest flexes down, so you get a lowland.”

Over time, that land became low enough to fall below sea level, and water from the oceans came in on top of it. What it created was an inland sea—an ocean on top of continental crust, like Canada’s Hudson Bay of modern times. And it was home to a variety of large sharks, which date to even longer ago than the fossils on the East Coast.

But searching for teeth in the central states is a much different experience from fossil hunting along the shore. There, the teeth reveal themselves in interior waterways, natural ridges or places where the ground has been cut through. In areas where mining has stripped the Earth’s surface, fossil shark teeth can appear. River cuts and ridges along roadsides are also a prime place to look, Cotter says, where erosion from rain can bring the fossils out from the ground.

In the central U.S., teeth will appear at the surface as Cretaceous shale becomes exposed by weathering. In Minnesota, that sediment looks like a crumbly, gray, clayey rock. Importantly, you can leave any tools—such as a hammer or shovel—at home. “Digging will get you nowhere,” Cotter writes in an email. “You just walk along a road ditch or river bottom and see what you can find.”

Though collecting in national parks isn’t allowed, Cotter suggests looking in areas near Big Bend in Texas, Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Mesa Verde in Colorado or the Badlands in South Dakota, because these areas have Cretaceous sediment deposits. Potential sites in the region include Shark Tooth Ridge in New Mexico and Post Oak Creek in North Texas.

In Minnesota, Cotter travels with his college students to Cretaceous sites in the state’s Iron Range of ore-rich areas that host Cretaceous sediment where shark teeth can be found. At Traverse County Park in western Minnesota, shark teeth can appear along the shores of Lake Traverse if the water level is low.

Wherever you go, and no matter what you find, simply looking for shark teeth is a captivating activity. While in the field with his students, Cotter says their main focus is often Cretaceous or glacial geology. But as soon as he lets slip that shark teeth could be in the area, his students are immediately drawn into the search.

“​​Kind of offhanded, I’ll say, ‘Oh, and by the way, you find shark’s teeth around here,’” he says. “And I have to save that last sentence until the very end, because they won’t listen to whatever I say—they’re looking for shark teeth at that point. And I’ve completely lost them.”

Carlyn Kranking | | READ MORE

Carlyn Kranking is the assistant web editor for science and innovation.