New analysis of tooth minerals confirms megalodon shark was warm-blooded
phys.org
phys.org
There's some kind of sea-floor phenomenon that causes teeth to wash up on the beach in Venice, Florida, with a great regularity. 30 years ago, there were a lot more teeth.
Nowadays, scuba divers get most of them a couple hundred yards offshore at some underwater ledge, so they are more rare at the beach.
A great time to go is after a hurricane.
Do not collect ANY fossils you discover in Canada.
It is a serious federal offence.
There are specific exceptions but it is beyond the ability of the average person to be able to ensure compliance. What may appear to be an abundant and common deposit can in fact be one which is not part of the exceptions to the collection rules.
You should try it.
Someday I hope to have enough to make a throne-like chair out of Megalodon teeth, sort of like the GoT throne made of iron swords.
Think of it this way. Megaladon existed for ~20 million years. If one died in this area every year, you would have 5.6 billion teeth
Due to their shape and density, they were also more likely to quickly sink into sediment and avoid decomposition entirely. Then when the Pacific plate interacted with the North American plate, all of that ocean sediment was lifted up to form California.
They're actually relatively uncommon on the west coast compared to the East coast (the Carolinas especially). Sharktooth hill has lots more fossils of seals, sea lions, turtles, birds, whales, and other marine life.
I guess it must have been named because even a smaller number of shark teeth is less common than those other fossils in the area?
I think miscellaneous shark teeth are the most common fossil at Sharktooth Hill, they're just not as big or interesting as the megalodon teeth because they're difficult for a layman to age. Most megalodon teeth are obvious due to their size and most people are happy with a 5-25 Mya estimate.
Fast-following you sounds good!
For rounding out my collection of all the periods, I'm looking at fish and aquatic animals like trilobites.
one notable realization in recent decades has been the role of thermophysiological differences among marine vertebrates that plays on their geographic and bathymetric distributions. For example, endothermic taxa can have higher cruising speeds that increase prey encounter rates as well as wider migration ranges compared to their ectothermic counterparts. In fact, endothermy, the ability to metabolically elevate and retain body heat over a broad ambient temperature range, is regarded to have an evolutionary merit as demonstrated by the fact that it evolved multiple times in vertebrate history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoregulation
Thermoregulation in organisms runs along a spectrum from endothermy to ectothermy. Endotherms create most of their heat via metabolic processes and are colloquially referred to as warm-blooded. When the surrounding temperatures are cold, endotherms increase metabolic heat production to keep their body temperature constant, thus making the internal body temperature of an endotherm more or less independent of the temperature of the environment. Endotherms possess a larger number of mitochondria per cell than ectotherms, enabling them to generate more heat by increasing the rate at which they metabolize fats and sugars.