Edition 7GV SUN 20 OCT 2002, Page Culture 53

Jaws of prehistory; My best buy; Interview; Steve Britton; Doors

JAMES KNIGHT

Steve Britton, 39, a fossil collector from Devon, explains to James
Knight how the web feeds his passion for sharks' teeth millions of
years old

'When visiting local fossil shops, I started to notice huge sharks'
teeth - then I spotted the huge price tag. They belonged to a
creature called a Megalodon, a giant shark that lived about 30m years ago, grew to 65ft and weighed 11 tons. You could have fitted a man with a child on his shoulders between the fully open jaws.

The shops wanted about Pounds 160 a tooth: online, teeth were a
third of the price. One store in the United States suggested that I
look on eBay, and I was surprised by the number of people who were trading fossils.

I spend Pounds 20-Pounds 50 on a tooth, and have 20 of them. I use
PayPal for international orders - a secure way of using a credit card
online. It makes life so much easier, and the bank doesn't seem to
impose any conversion charges on payments.

The service from these guys in the States is second to none. On one
occasion I bought two teeth from www.megateeth.com. They didn't turn up, so my contact offered to wait a week and send two better
replacements. If the originals turned up and I didn't want them, he
would pay for the carriage back to the States, or I could purchase
them then. We could learn lessons about service from our cousins
across the water.

Normally, I pay between Pounds 3 and Pounds 8 per tooth for
shipping. A couple of times it was about Pounds 13, but in both
cases, the sites acknowledged that they had overcharged.
I also look for fossils on local beaches. Lyme Regis, one of the
most famous places for fossils in this country, is only 15 miles from
where I live. My biggest find is a section of an ichthyosaur - a
water-dwelling dinosaur, 180 million years old - that I found at
Charmouth last September. That was valued at about Pounds 1,000 - not bad for a morning's work.'