Florida Man - Shark Tooth

An atypical late winter escape for us.  Off to Florida with assorted family and friends.  Here's the end of the day...

People just go to the beach to watch the sun go down.  I could get used to that.

But a good part of the day was spent doing this:

The place we are at is apparently the fossil shark tooth capitol of the world.  Why there are so many of these in the sand I cannot say.  But if you sift and sort enough broken up shells, you find them.

I figured I would be really good at this.  When I am on an archeology dig I have an excellent "eye" and often spot things missed by others.  So why did I struggle with these?

I had to think on this a bit.  I guess its because much of the business of spotting artifacts is being able to tell the difference between natural and man made objects.  Certain shapes, colors, textures just don't occur naturally and you learn these quickly.  In shark tooth hunting you are just trying to pick one sort of natural world object out of big piles of other objects.  So if archaeology is sometimes looking for the needle in the haystack, this sort of work is looking through a haystack for a slightly different piece of hay!