My five-year-old son, Eli, loves both the ocean and all things dinosaur-related. When I learned about a beach near us on the Chesapeake Bay that was prime ground for fossil-hunting—specifically for shark teeth—I knew we had to go.
It’s a beautiful place. The water, the sky, the sand–it’s all peaceful and lovely. And the fossils are as abundant as promised, but they’re not found in the cliffs behind the beach because they wash into the bay when erosion occurs. I can wade into the water up to my ankles, pick up a handful of shell detritus, and immediately find at least one fossilized shark tooth. Eli, as it turns out, is quite content to play in the sand and let me find shark teeth on his behalf.
On one of our trips there, I observed a couple who had also come to look for shark teeth. I stood in the lapping shallows, putting tooth after tooth into my pocket as I listened to them become more and more frustrated. They stood directly in front of the cliffs, moving closer and closer to them, examining every square inch. After about thirty minutes, they huffed back to their car, grumbling about how misled they had been because there just weren’t any shark teeth there.
While they had been frantically and fruitlessly searching the sand near the cliffs, I had found thirty-four shark teeth in the water. All they had to do was turn around, roll up their pant legs, and step into the water.
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