These are my two favorite meg teeth -- the only complete ones, although a third one is just missing a root corner -- out of the several that my husband and I found on our Venice Beach dive trip yesterday. After soaking in apple cider vinegar for most of the day, all the coral and growths could be brushed off, leaving the teeth a nice and shiny black. You can see the "before" shot of all the teeth here. The difference is phenomenal!

First panel: WOO! This is a three-inch tooth that I found just a few minutes after we went down on our first of two dives. It's the only one that I found during that dive; Brandon didn't find any.

Second panel: BOO. On our second dive, Brandon totally schooled me by picking up this nice-sized beauty. About three-and-a-half inches tall, perfectly formed, probably from the center of the meg's jaw, and still boasting steak-knife-sharp serrations... it's gorgeous. The captain of our boat, a retired geologist, said this sucker would easily fetch seventy or eighty bucks if we wanted to put it on the market. Not a lot as far as megs go (some sell for thousands of dollars), but not bad for our first meg tooth hunt! We wouldn't want to part with it, anyway.

Third panel: a side-by-side size comparison, with mine on the left and Brandon's on the right. (Well, really, they're both ours, but I get competitive when it comes to mah shark teef.) Plz to ignore the Band-Aid; I sliced open both thumbs while trying to scrape barnacles off the teeth.

I can't wait to dive Venice again! Ohh, I love science. =)

June 20, 2008.