My, What Big Teeth You Had

By JEFF KLINKENBERG, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 27, 2002

WAUCHULA -- What you want to do before hunting the largest shark that ever lived is fortify yourself at Burger King. Order hash browns, a biscuit, plenty of coffee. You'll need your energy if you're tagging along with the shark guy.

Right now he's leading a group of wide-eyed adventurers into Meg's old stomping grounds.

"When you get into the water," Renz tells his followers, "it's going to feel a little cold. But you'll get used to it."

We're waist deep in Central Florida's Peace River, which millions of years ago was not a river but a shallow bay. It's where Carcharodon megalodon -- Meg -- had her young'uns. Her infants, 6- to 10-feet long, came into the world hungry. They gobbled up everything in sight, mostly the ancient manatees, called dugongs.

Baby Megs in the midst of a feeding frenzy couldn't have been a pretty sight. Sometimes, when their teeth met bone, the teeth lost the scuffle. Over several eras lasting 20-million years, lots of Meg teeth fell to the bottom.

Nobody knows for sure what finally happened to Meg. We only know the super shark vanished from the Earth about 2-million years ago. As years passed, fossilized teeth were covered up by muck, uncovered by storms and tossed and turned as ice ages waxed and waned and the Florida peninsula popped out of the ocean.

Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, just down the road from Burger King and the rest of modern Florida, Mark Renz, the poet of paleontology, is looking for them.

Plunge into prehistory

At 6 feet 5, he would have made a nice morsel for Meg. He's all arms and legs, with a two-day beard and a passionate personality that has sometimes led him to rush in where more moderate souls might fear to tread -- or swim.

Years ago, when he first began looking for fossils, nothing kept him from his appointed rounds.

He can tell you about the time he rode his motorcycle from his home in Fort Myers to the banks of the Caloosahatchee River and, lacking a boat, dove in. Halfway across the 300-foot waterway, he noticed the fast approach of a 60-foot yacht. "Swimming like a madman," he says, was his response. When the waves subsided, he dove into the shallows and harvested shark teeth and a bison tooth.

At dusk, he swam back across. What he first took to be a discarded tire in the middle of the river turned out to be a curious 10-foot alligator. This time Renz swam less like a madman and more like Tarzan.

These days he is a model citizen who takes no foolish chances except when he shows skeptical friends the romantic poetry he writes about his bone love. He also pens down-to-earth prose. He's the author of Fossiling in Florida and just published a new book, Megalodon: Hunting the Hunter. He also has a business, Fossil Expeditions, guiding interested parties who want to look for ancient bones.

Everything is on the up and up. He holds a fossil-collecting permit from the state of Florida and tells his clients that earthshaking finds have to be offered to the Florida Museum of Natural History. Some of his best discoveries, including an almost complete dugong skeleton, have gone to the museum.

"It's an honor," he says.

Anyone legally can keep shark teeth. After all, they number in the gazillions. The logical place to find them is at the beach. They are also uncovered in the phosphate pits of Central Florida. Renz prefers hunting in rivers. For one thing, the water is cool even in summer and clear enough to spot critters well in advance.

Rivers aren't free of alligators, of course, but no place is perfect.

Freed-Hardeman University students Sarah Roberts, 21 (left), a senior, and Lindsey Hatch, 19, a junior, seek fossils with shovel and sifter. "I'm trying not to think about the snakes and alligators," said Roberts, who spent several hours in the water.

Panning for precious bones

Renz hands us our weaponry. We are armed for a possible Meg encounter with shovels and sieves. As a gentle current tickles our goose-pimpled backsides, we dig into the river bottom with our shovels, then carefully dump the booty into the floating sieves. We shake, rattle and roll the sieves until the mud, leaves and small pebbles are winnowed out. What's left is black and fossiliferous.

"Ah, that's nice, that's nice, that's cool," Mark Renz tells us, as his fingers pick through our sieves. "That's a tooth from an ancient lemon shark. Oh, there's a horse tooth. That's something from an old armadillo."

Not the roadkill armadillo we all saw on the drive over. This bone came from a five-footer. "Are we going to find any dinosaur bones?" asks one of his clients, a college student from Penn State.

"Florida didn't have dinosaurs," he tells her. Dinosaurs had been long extinct when Florida popped out of the drink.

We had all kinds of cool reptiles, fish and amazing animals, from saber-toothed cats, to a 10-foot tall flesh-eating bird that ran down and devoured tiny horses. We had llamas and camels and a couple of ancient elephants, the grass-grazing mammoths and tree-chomping mastodons. A roly-poly armadillo relative, the glyptodant, was about the size of a VW Beetle.

As for reptiles, even TV's Croc Hunter would have avoided taking a dip. Florida's crocodiles measured more than 30 feet.

Renz is mostly self-taught in paleontology. He served in the Coast Guard in Alaska, rode a bicycle 6,000 miles around the United States and hitchhiked to Nashville to be a songwriter, but says he didn't have the right stuff. He can sort of understand why no member of the Grand Ole Opry bothered recording his opus, Alligator Alley, about the time he and a pal tried roller-skating, after dark, across the famous Everglades highway but were stopped by hard-eyed lawmen.

About a decade ago he moved back to Florida. One morning he was fishing with his brother. The bass weren't biting. His brother suggested they go for a dip next to the river bank. Voila! Shark teeth. Teeth and bone became his Moby Dick.

Like Ahab, he never stopped hunting.

Poetry and paleontology

That requires a great passion. Renz conveys his in poetry:

This is our moment
here among the stones
that once breathed life
well before our kind
This is our moment
to flesh out the bones
with shovel and screen
and know our place in time
This is our moment
to stand where mammoths stood
to sense their presence
and know we'll join them soon
This is our moment
to wish we somehow could
hold life forever dear
and never enter the tomb.

Caught by the moment

Oh, Meg. Where art thou?

Not here.

It's early afternoon on the Peace River. The dirty dozen, we are panning for fossils like gold miners. But we get a whale bone. Sawfish tooth. Dolphin tooth. Bison bone. And lots and lots of rock.

Renz found his first good Meg tooth while snorkeling in a Central Florida stream nearly a decade ago. He was looking for dugong bones when he saw something black in the sand. It was a tooth, 2 inches long. What made it even more significant was the hole that had been drilled through the top.

An ancient Floridian, sometime in the last 12,000 years, had found the tooth and probably worn it around his neck. That was the ancient Floridian's moment: perhaps the pendant gave him pleasure. And strength. Then he died and was buried and the tooth was lost and waited at the bottom of the stream for a modern man to come along for his own moment.

He's hoping his group of river waders will strike it rich, too. Most of Renz's clients -- they include a couple of vacationing mail carriers and a shell guide from Sanibel -- take a break for lunch. But a few of the college students, youthful energy boiling off of them like fog, keep at it.

"YES! YES! YES!"

You can hear Matthew Sokoloski's screams up and down the river. In his trembling hand is a big black tooth.

"A perfect Meg specimen," shouts Renz, just as thrilled.

The find prompts another frenzy of river digging.

"YES! YES! YES!"

This time it's his friend, Brooks Tiller, doing the celebrating. He was digging about a foot from his buddy. His Meg tooth is a perfect match.

Both of the men are college seniors in their early 20s. For the next hour they look at each other and laugh and slap palms.

Renz can tell them -- he wrote that poem about it -- that this is their moment, even if they don't realize it.

With Meg teeth in their pockets, they feel don't feel like mortality is waiting around the corner.

They feel like they might just live forever.

To find out more about Fossil Expeditions, (239) 888-5237. Or see the Web site: www.fossilexpeditions.com or www.megalodonexpeditions.com. Mark Renz's e-mail address is Mark@fossilexpeditions.com.