Before we left Minneapolis, Jackson had a conversation with a docent at the Science Museum about fossils. The kind gentleman drew a map of where we would most successfully find fossilized shark teeth on the beach. Jackson had been obsessed about it for months, and we finally were able to follow that map to the "x", Caspersen Beach, just south of Venice.
We were mesmerized by the warm sun, the rhythm of the waves, and fingering handfuls of white shell-filled sand. And we found shark teeth! A handy little sand sifting shovel was really helpful for getting a big scoop of the shelf, sluicing our the sand and leaving behind a scoop of treasures.
Caspersen Beach is known as the "shark tooth capital of the world" because of the phosphate rich formations underground that are continuously exposed by the Peace River, depositing fossils onto the beaches in the Venice area. Shark teeth are numerous (sharks can loose over 10,000 teeth in a lifetime!), very dense and fossilize easily, so these teeth could be anywhere between 11,000 year old to 2.5 million years old!!
We stayed all day, watching the sunset. This was a day right out of the book of dreams.
We loved Caspersan Beach. We found it in a tour book while we were travelling in Florida for our honeymoon and decided to make it a stop. We stayed in a campground not far from there. We found a couple teeth, but looks like you had a pretty good haul. We hope to go there again and maybe find some of those huge Megalodon teeth some day.
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