“Everything tells a story,” Osborne says. “You look at a rib fragment and you see the serrations and lacerations from a shark attack. It's absolutely amazing to imagine what the seas were like back then.”

Some of those shark teeth can be big—really big. In his personal collection—Osborne also donates some of his finds to museums—he has one specimen from a megatooth shark that measures 5 3/4 inches from top to bottom. He's also made larger fossil finds, including the skull and vertebrae of a baleen whale, a rare partial association of sea snake vertebrae from the Eocene epoch that he uncovered along the Potomac River last New Year's Day, and the skull of a yet-to-be-identified porpoise species that he found while diving in southern Virginia.

“There's nothing like it when you're crawling around on the bottom and you find something like that just lying on the riverbed, and you're the first person to see it and touch it,” he says. “It's a heck of a feeling.”

On this brisk midwinter day, Osborne scours the tideline for tiny tiger shark teeth and other fossil remnants. After a time, he turns his trained eye upward, to the steep cliffs rising above the beach. A glint of white catches his eye. “That might be something,” he says and reaches for his binoculars. With the powerful glasses, he can make out a flat, chalky circle with what appear to be white extensions coming out of the side. Though state laws prohibit him from climbing the unstable cliff to investigate, he plans to report the find to his friends at the Calvert Marine Museum.

“It could be a big radius [bone] but I can't imagine one that big,” he says, grinning as he lowers the binoculars. “That's cool. That's definitely cool.”

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