Walking up and down the beach while on vacation in Florida looking for sharks teeth has always been a favorite past time of mine. But at the end of the day all I usually wind up with is a sore neck and back from looking down and bending over to pick up what I thought was a sharks tooth. After several years of only finding broken shell pieces that resemble sharks teeth, I figured it was just by luck that people find them, and I must be very unlucky. But when my kids started getting discouraged, also, from never finding a sharks tooth, I decided to research the best sharks tooth beaches in Florida. We hit the jackpot, finding one near my parent’s town of Bradenton, Florida.
Venice Beach is about half way between Tampa and Fort Meyers, and is known for having sharks teeth wash up on shore. We headed down to the beach with a few small fish nets in hand to try our luck. After scooping a few times and sifting through the nets, we found a few teeth to my kids’ delight. But after awhile, our nets weren’t holding up very well and the teeth weren’t as plentiful as we had hoped. We decided to break for lunch and a after stopping by a local beach shop and buying a more sturdy metal scoop, my parents took us to another beach just south of Venice called Caspersen Beach. They had heard it was even better of sharks tooth hunting. It is a much narrower beach in a more natural setting it is not as crowded and touristy as Venice. It also looked unusual because it had large boulders sticking out of the sand. We decided to give it a try and after a couple of scoops, we were not disappointed. Almost every scoop yielded sharks teeth, it was unbelievable! We scooped for hours alongside other avid scoopers. We discovered that the prime scooping area is just where the waves break where the shoreline drops off a little bit. We would then take the scoop onto the beach, sit on a boulder and sift through it to find our treasures and put the sharks teeth we found into little pails. We found many different kinds of pre-historic sharks teeth. It was an amazing day, but we were getting tired and the sun was starting to set, so we decided to get going. I thought one last scoop was in order so I headed down to the shore, only to find myself flat on my face in the sand and pain surging through my toe. I had not seen the small boulder covered with sand and in my haste to make one last scoop, tripped (very ungracefully mind you) and stubbed my toe. I guess the last scoop would have to wait.Later that evening at my parent’s house we all sifted through our findings, washed them off and admired the fruits of our labor. Between the five of us we probably had over 300 sharks teeth!
If you are in the Venice Beach area I would highly recommend visiting Caspersen Beach and trying your luck at scooping. It is worth your while to visit a local beach shop and purchase a metal scoop since they hold up better than the regular fish scoops. The beach is located on Harbor Drive in Sarasota County and it also has a good selection of seashells. I would also advise that unless you want a mouth full of sand and a sore toe, watch out for those sandy rocks! Happy scooping!
