Photo by Paul Christiansen.
Edisto Beach.
Edisto Beach.
Bundled in layers, I shivered against the cold ocean breeze hand concentrated on the thick line of shells snaking along the wide expanse of beach before me. My family had already spread out, each one hoping to be the first to spot a fossilized shark tooth amidst the colorful shells left exposed by the receding tide. We had driven from Charleston, South Carolina, to Edisto Beach State Park on this January morning to meet Ashley Oliphant, author of Shark Tooth Hunting on the Carolina Coast.
A professional beach comber, Oliphant arrived in flip flops and a tank top. A light jacket was thrown over her perfectly tanned arm. She drove over three hours to meet us at Edisto, to show us one of her favorite spots for fossil hunting. When asked if she minded giving away her hunting locales, she shrugged, “There’s enough treasure in this ocean for all of us.”
She pulled out a small bowl of fossilized shark teeth, ranging in size from an inch to the size of her palm. These were just a handful of the specimens in her collection of hundreds of thousands of teeth. Up to 30 million years ago, these teeth fell from the mouths of ancient sharks that swam ocean waters covering nearly half of present-day South Carolina.
[Read this: A Guide to Texas Fossil Country]
“You have to train your eyes,” she told us while we analyzed each of the teeth, some jet black in color and others brown, or the rare Carolina cream. The color depended on the minerals in the sediment when the fossil was created. “The more you hold and study, the more your eyes are used to seeing it.”
Oliphant grew up shark teeth hunting on family vacations to North Myrtle Beach. Her passion never died, and in 2015, she published her book, which details both how to hunt for teeth and describes the ancient sharks from which they came. Today, she teaches shark teeth and shelling classes at Coastal Carolina University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) and offers speaking engagements at libraries, shell clubs, and other groups. Her sixth book, The Ultimate Shell Seeker's Guide: Building a Better Beachcombing Strategy, comes out this year.
Photo by Paul Christiansen.
Some of the shark teeth found on Crab Bank.
Some of the shark teeth found on Crab Bank.
“For fossil hunting, almost all of the Gulf Coast is good, but the best place is the Carolinas,” said Oliphant. “Millions and millions of years ago, the Carolinas’ mid-state sandhills were the coastline, and megatooth sharks swam all over here. Now you can find their teeth from the sandhills eastward to the ocean by digging, looking in creeks, and scuba diving, but the easiest and safest way is looking on the beach.”
The abundance of teeth relies on many factors, such as the location of fossil deposits being washed out, the wind, the currents, and the season. “Some reliable places are Edisto Beach and anywhere on the Grand Strand, from Myrtle Beach to Pawleys Island,” explained Oliphant, who learned first-hand by visiting every beach in the Carolinas and tracking the online fossil forums. She often hunts at night with a headlamp, arriving at high tide after midnight and searching through the early morning hours. “You want a falling tide. You always find more as the water goes out rather than in. Plus, the teeth are easier to spot in the wet sand.”
She walked with us a bit, eliciting a shout of joy when she spotted a giant fossilized horse tooth. “I never find these on the beach!” she exclaimed.
Oliphant eventually departed to meet a scuba diver collecting the enormous Megalodon shark teeth. She explained divers often discover the hand-sized teeth offshore and in coastal rivers. Meanwhile, we continued down the beach, finding a handful of smaller, glistening black shark teeth over the next several hours.
“You have to train your eyes. The more you hold and study, the more your eyes are used to seeing it.” —Ashley Oliphant
Later that evening, we discussed our treasures over the monumental family platter at Swig & Swine BBQ in Charleston’s West Ashley district. We devoured the meal, which included seven cuts of meats, including pulled pork, brisket, and smoked turkey, at a restaurant that has been “horrifying vegetarians since 2013.”
The next morning, we stopped by the College of Charleston’s Mace Brown Museum of Natural History to learn more about the marine fossils found in the area and marvel at the giant jaw of the extinct Megalodon shark, which could grow up to sixty-five feet long. From here, we traveled to Mount Pleasant, where we had booked a late afternoon boat and fossil adventure with Coastal Expeditions.
First stop, though, was lunch at Vicious Biscuit. Their Southern buttermilk biscuits come stuffed with a range of delights, such as The Fat Boy’s crispy fried chicken and pimento cheese. After its flagship Mount Pleasant location opened in 2018, the restaurant spread across the South, with its latest opening in Gonzales, Louisiana.
Ready to burn off those calories, we headed to the Shem Creek Waterfront to board Coastal Expedition’s boat for our twenty-minute journey to New Crab Bank (aka Shark Tooth Island). On the scenic ride past rows of shrimp boats, naturalist Jackie Kelsey explained how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) built Crab Bank in the 1950s when they deposited soil dredged from the harbor. The island became a flourishing bird nesting refuge—until the land eroded away. Coastal Expeditions and other environmental partners approached the Corps to rebuild the island, but the agency was bound to follow the least costly option for disposal of the dredged waste, which was pumping it offshore. Negotiations ensued and the environmental groups agreed to fundraise the $3 million needed to recreate Crab Bank. In December 2021, the Corps built New Crab Bank, and the birds flocked to the 32-acre island.
Photo by Paul Christiansen.
Crab Bank.
Crab Bank.
From March 15 to October 15, the island is closed for nesting, but the winter brings a new opportunity—fossil hunting. “Imagine flipping a cake over and having the bottom layer on top. This is what the Corps did. Now the fossil layer is on top. They are not washing up on the beach, but rather coming out of it,” said Kelsey, who has spent ten years guiding adventures across the United States.
As the boat came ashore on the beach, Kelsey lowered the plank, and we single-file marched onto the treeless island. Almost immediately, she drew a circle on the ground and asked a child to find the tooth. He gently picked up the nearly two-inch specimen, his contagious smile energizing the group with hopes for a successful hunt.
I started out above the water line, picking up nearly every small, black object I saw. Most, as Kelsey described them, were matrix, or blobs of phosphate. As I wondered if my vision simply wasn’t sharp enough to catch sight of the signature triangular-shaped teeth, I spotted a much larger object in the shallow water several feet away. Round with a cylindrical indentation, it was a fossilized shark vertebrate. Shortly after, I started finding steinkerns, fossilized casts of the insides of clams. I refocused my efforts and started sloshing through the water, collecting new treasures every few minutes.
The two hours on the beach passed quickly, and once again, we displayed our finds over an evening dinner, this time at Mex 1 Coastal Cantina on Sullivan’s Island. As we fought over the last dregs of the addictive street corn queso, my sixteen-year-old son ceremoniously started emptying his pockets and lined the table with more than fifty teeth. While he gleefully roasted our inferior efforts, the rest of us savored our tacos and burritos and downed our margaritas and the very fitting Shark Attack drinks (Shirley Temples with toy sharks that poured out liquid to turn the drinks red).
All in all, it was a productive two days, filled with long walks on the beach, gorgeous red sunsets on the Carolina coast, and a box of fossils to display at home as a guaranteed conversation starter.
Disclaimer: This trip was partially funded by the Charleston Area CVB, though the opinions of the writer are entirely her own and formed independently of this fact.
