The Original Boneyard Divers

Hello, I'm Susan, and I was introduced to scuba diving 30 years ago when I met my husband, Rob. It has now become his passion and a favorite sport of mine, too. We moved to Carolina Beach, NC in 1996 and have been diving it's coast ever since. We mostly enjoy exploring ledges and shipwrecks and spearing grouper, snapper, lionfish, and catching lobster.

One day in 1999, when Rob was involved in a spearfishing tournament, one of his buddy's girlfriends at the time came back into the boat with a curiously-shaped triangular rock. She did not know what it was, but Rob immediately recognized it as a tooth. Not just any tooth, but the tooth of a Carcharodon megalodon. Not at the time, but these we later learned, were the biggest sharks that ever lived. They roamed the seas for millions of years from 50 million years ago to a couple million year ago. Their 50-60 foot long skeletons were cartilaginous instead of bony, and were too soft to remain intact to become fossilized; they quickly dissolved into their component chemicals. Their teeth, however, were dispersed by currents and tides, but were hard enough to survive the millennia.

Diving to find more of these teeth became an obsession. That original spot and surrounding area was named the "boneyard" due to it's bounty of teeth and other bones. After 22 years of tooth-hunting, and with Rob being the master finder (being quoted in Gary Gentile's book, Shipwreck Sagas, 2008, as "the original offshore megalodontist"), we have more teeth than we know what to do with! I decided to let my creative side come out and make the smaller ones into necklaces and other creations to share these unique finds with the world.

I like to keep them natural (only cleaning off the coral and encrustation with vinegar) and not drilling holes into them or covering them in any way with lots of metal. These are fossils and anywhere between 2 - 50 million years old!

We also find extinct giant mako shark teeth, extinct great white shark teeth, extinct snaggle tooth shark teeth, and extinct tiger shark teeth. I love to make custom pieces for customers , too, which makes them very happy!