LIBERTY COUNTY, Ga. —It’s an overcast…steamy September morning along the Georgia coast.
As the rain moves in….Bill Eberlein is moving out….and headed down.
Forty or sixty feet down to be exact.
Eberlein is a diver and shark tooth hunter. He’s really good too.
“May of this year, I was out in the water 29 of 31 days,” laughs Eberlein. “I get up in the morning and I don’t want to do anything else.”
As he disappears into the murky waters of this Liberty County waterway, Eberlein is hoping this dive takes him back in time. Like millions of years. Eberlein is looking for Megalodon teeth.
“A Great White tooth is about two inches long, now a 60-foot, 50-foot megalodon tooth would have these five to sixth inch long teeth.”
Megalodon was the biggest predator to ever live. Reaching up to sixty feet in length and weighing as much as a hundred tons, these super sized sharks used to hunt the worlds oceans, including right here off the Georgia coast.
Megalodon went extinct about three million years ago.
“It just amazes you when you find them cause one minute you have nothing in your hands and the next, you’re holding this massive tooth,” explains Eberlein. “Visibility down there is so bad, you’re holding the tooth up to your mask to see what you found.”
Eberlein feels his way along river bottoms and the ocean floor in his quest to find the prized prehistoric teeth.
On this dreary morning, Eberlein surfaces after nearly an hour and a half with nearly a dozen teeth in his bag.
“It was good, anything you find something it was a good day,” says Eberlein.
The teeth with be cleaned, polished and sold to museums and collectors around the world. For Eberlein the big payoff is connecting people to history.
“People always think of when we got here, but before us there was a lot of interesting things,” explains Eberlein.
For more information about Eberlein or to see some of the Megalodon teeth currently for sale, visit https://megateeth.com/