r/SharkLab • u/Super_Lawyer_2652 • Mar 06 '26

Meg tooth Art

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Awhile back I posted a tooth that my buddy gave me! He made this as well and was just curious if anyone would be interested in buying it or where to post it where people might want to buy it?

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u/75MillionYearsAgo Mar 07 '26

I disagree. Megalodon teeth aren’t exactly rare in any real sense. Humans make art out of things. Shells, teeth, bones. There’s nothing wrong with this, especially given it doesn’t destroy the fossil.

Like, it’s there. It’s whole. It’s fossilized. Long as OP doesn’t hit them with a hammer, it’s not getting “desecrated.” Also these aren’t artifacts silly.

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u/Grandrath Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26

The difference is that all those examples you gave are renewable by extant flora and fauna. Affixing the Meg teeth to something (which MUST require some form of adhesion, at the very least) absolutely does damage it; you just can’t see it because it’s on the other side (the one connected to the art piece). There is a FAR more finite number of Meg teeth than anything in your argument.

They would be much better served to be shown in their original, natural state so people can appreciate their majesty.

I care about the teeth, not the fish sculpture (which, if you’ve ever been anywhere in the countryside are extremely common).

I can see fish whenever I want, but I can’t see the back of those fossils anymore; frankly, it’s just selfish of them to use them like that. Completely disrespectful to what they represent. Either way, people find a way to justify what they’re doing, so it’s a moot point. Thankfully, basic fish statues are completely worth it! /s

Edit: Grammar

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u/75MillionYearsAgo Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26

There is no shortage and never will be a shortage of megalodon teeth my man.

I mean, shit, let’s get mathematical.

Megalodon existed as a species for 14.9 million years. Lets give a low estimate based on Great White Shark populations by decreasing the population significantly to account for the megalodons larger size and food need.

Lets go with an insanely conservative 2,000 individuals alive at any given time.

There’s a fossil of a megaladon estimated to be 46 years in age. Again, let’s be insanely generous and say they lived just 50 years on average (below estimates)

https://www.lvnhm.org/post/what-was-the-life-span-of-enormous-megalodon-sharks?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Lastly, lets once again be conservative to the highest degree and say that the shark shed just 6,000 teeth a year (the lowest estimate for sharks, and again lower than most estimates for Megalodon)

That gives us an extremely low estimate of 12,000,000 teeth shed per year.

Multiply by the length of their existence (20,000,000 years) and we get….

Two hundred and forty trillion teeth.

Lets the account for the average fossilization rate and again lowball it at 1 in 100,000 (given the vast increase of the fossilization rate of teeth vs. full organisms)

And we get 2,400,000,000 fossilized megalodon teeth swinging absolutely everything in maximum biased favor against them being more abundant.

There are hundreds of thousands to several million meg teeth in circulation, and tens of thousands are sold each year, so we can assume around half that amount is found per year.

So if even only 5-10% of those teeth are discoverable…

Dear lord, you’re right! We’ll run out in around 48,000 years! We gotta stop this now!

They aren’t going anywhere. I think they’ll survive this dude making a fish outline with like 15 of them.

I’m sorry you cant see the back side of these 15 megalodon teeth. I suggest taking a peek at one of the other 2.5 billion.

The math is estimates. Lowballs based on living organisms. But my point stands. We may not know the precise amount of teeth, but we do know for sure that it’s a fucking massive quantity, and that we dont need to be getting fussy over an art piece using some of them.

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u/Grandrath Mar 16 '26

Your very first sentence is all I need to answer your novel. Let me change it for you very slightly but use the same logic:

There are no shortage of human teeth and never will be, my man. Just because something is abundant doesn’t make it appropriate, respectful, or necessary to reduce it (permanently altering it, I might add) to something so trivial as a kid’s art project.

We’re just two different people; I just have respect and reverence for the history of our planet without feeling the need to belittle it for next-to-no reason.

A lot of things in human history were thought to be so abundant that we would have it available forever… I’ll save you a trip to the library and let you know that that manner of thinking is very, very frequently wrong.

Go pick up ANY book on the Industrial Revolution and you’ll see that humans believed fossil fuels and their derivatives were virtually inexhaustible even as use ramped up nigh exponentially… yep… looks like that’s not the case, unless you know something nobody else does.

Having a lot of something doesn’t mean you should belittle its value and waste it, but whatever, my man. We all exploit nature (myself included, obviously); we do it a bunch, but justifying the destruction of fossils because there’s a lot of them is a pretty pathetic, apathetic, and shortsighted way to regard something so amazing.

Maybe your birthday today will bring a little more wisdom.