Venice hosts 3-day shark’s tooth festival in mid-April By Bob
Berwyn SUMMIT COUNTY — Sharks have lived and died in the Gulf of
Mexico for millions of years, and since the mighty ocean
predators continually produce new teeth (up to 24,000 in the
lifetime of a single tiger shark) it stands to reason that some
of those teeth end up as fossils that wash up on Florida
beaches. During those eons, millions of sharks have died and
sunk to the bottom of the gulf, where the carcasses are covered
with silt and sand. The flesh and cartilage of the bodies
disintegrate, but the teeth remain and gradually become
fossilized. Some of them eventually wash up on the beaches with
changing tides and waves, where they fascinate beachcombers who
sift the sand with long-handles sieves in hopes of finding a
perfect specimen — perhaps a well-preserved, five-inch dagger
from a Carcharodon megalodon, at 50 feet, the largest shark to
ever swim the seas. The area around Venice, Florida, is a ground
zero of sorts for the petrified teeth, a