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Product Description
If you collect the best fossils, here is a chance to get a fossil shark tooth from the extinct Snaggletooth Shark, Hemipristis, that will trump anything in your collection. At maximum size for this species, it features incredible preservation, stunning unique olive green and gold colors found ONLY in Bone Valley fossil shark teeth! It comes from a Bone Valley phosphate mine worker's collection formed 20 years ago and was the most beautiful fossil shark tooth of his collection.
Deposits and mine operations today are no where near what they used to be and the site has been not producing the fossils it once used to. Furthermore, the mines have been closed to public collectors for many decades, making this a highly desirable specimen that will become even more rare and valuable as time goes on.
HISTORY
From the middle Miocene, 16 million years ago to the earliest Pliocene, about 4.5 million years ago, no other region in North America can claim a more varied and richer wealth of important vertebrate fossil finds than from the famous BONE VALLEY region in the phosphate mining district of Central Florida. During this time, thick forests and grassy plains covered a stubby peninsula that only went as far south to what is now Polk County. If you were to visit this area at that time, you would find six-foot tortoises, shovel-tusked mastodons, hornless rhinos, humpless camels, iguanas, gila monsters, and 30-foot crocodiles. The warm waters surrounding the area were filled with a rich variety of life as well, including long-beaked dolphins, bony fish, rays, sea cows and sharks including the notorious and now extinct giant killer shark, Megalodon.
Bone Valley fossils are rare and highly-priced specimens. Due to the unique geological characteristics of the phosphate-rich region, most of the fossils are beautifully preserved with amazing detail and color. Unlike the majority of southeastern U.S. fossils retrieved from rivers and streams, Bone Valley specimens are found in dry earth and are not stained with the typical cruddy black and brown muck from rivers. Because Bone Valley fossils comprise so much variety of both ancient marine and terrestrial creatures, along with their unique and rare beauty of preservation, specimens from this locality are very rare and of great value to any fossil collection.