(WSVN) - A day at the beach could mean the possibility of seeing a shark, but there is also the chance you could see a sign of something much bigger that lurked below the surface millions of years ago. Kevin Ozebek shows us in today’s 7 Spotlight.
The next time you dive into the waters off Florida’s coast, be on the lookout! You never know what’s in the water.
OK, maybe you won’t find “Jaws,” but you could find this.
South Florida diver Ken Haley has collected thousands of fossilized shark teeth from the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. Most of his collection is made up of massive teeth from an ancient species of shark called megalodon.
Kevin Ozebek: “Roughly how old is this tooth?”
Ken Haley: “The Megalodon, they have charted between 2 to 20 million years old.”
Ken wasn’t fascinated with sharks as a child. His obsession started a few years ago when he went on a dive trip off Venice Beach.
Ken Haley: “And we found our first meg, and then we went on a boat charter, and after that I sort of went on board charter after boat charter, and you find more and more, and you’re hooked.”
Ken says Hollywood’s portrayal of megalodons as a vicious, blood-thirsty creature is a bit exaggerated, but their size was very real.
Kevin Ozebek: “So this would have been attached to a 60-foot shark? That’s like the size of a semi.”
At 60 feet long, they dwarfed the largest sharks today. These whale eaters were the largest shark to have ever prowled our oceans.
Ken Haley: “This is like the T-Rex of the ocean. There was nothing that could compete with it. There was nothing that could compare it to it.”
This is a tooth from your average size great white shark. A shark that’s about 12 to 15 feet long. Now, compare this to a nearly six and a half inch long megalodon tooth.
Ken Haley: “Oh, I have seen a Megalodon tooth go for as high as $13,000.”
Many of these teeth may go for high prices but finding them can be dangerous.
The biggest ones in Ken’s collection are found off the coast of North Carolina in extremely deep water.
Ken Haley: “I even have boat captains that won’t take somebody on that they don’t know or don’t have a reference or something along those lines because it’s dangerous.”
While on the hunt for shark teeth, Ken has come face to face with his fair share of real, living sharks.
Ken Haley: “They see you and they know you’re there long before you ever see them.”
Ken keeps much of what he finds, but he does offer up many of his shark teeth for sale.
Ken Haley: “I tell people all the time, you can own a piece of history!”
He hopes his buyers appreciate that these teeth, buried under the sand for millions of years, will continue to exist for millions more.
Kevin Ozebek, 7News.
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