Several first-time vendors presented their findings and other artifacts to area residents and visitors at the 2014 Aurora Fossil Festival on Saturday.

The festival featured vendors with tents full of shark teeth, fossil formations and other fossilized bones and items.

Megateeth Fossils displayed a vast array of shark teeth, particularly those of a pre-historic monster of the seas, the Megalodon. These teeth range in size from three inches to seven inches.

Megateeth Fossils Owner Bill Eberlein, of Savannah, Ga. said he does a lot of diving off the coasts of Savannah and the Outer Banks in North Carolina. Diving down anywhere from 40 feet to 100 feet, he has found hundreds of shark teeth — Megalodon teeth. This was Eberlein’s first year as a vendor at the festival.

“Everything I sell, I find myself,” Eberlein said. “It started out as kind of a hobby and it got to where I had so many teeth that it just took off. We donate some teeth to the auction here and some for the museum to sell.”

Other vendors, unlike Eberlein, specialize in fossils and rocks of a different nature. Steven and Rachel Miller, also first-time vendors at the festival showed their vast collection of agate slices and fossilized coral, which came from the Withlacoochee River in Florida. Steven Miller, who got his start as a kid, looking through fossil piles from New York’s Mohawk River, travels around to numerous festivals, displaying his findings.

“This is our first year here,” Miller said. “We’re having fun. I’ve been associated with the pit out here in the late 70s, early 80s so I’ve been familiar with this area and the teeth and the fossils here.”

First-time vendors Farid and Diane Oulahchoum presented a number of findings from Farid’s native land, Morocco, including Dessert Rose, a name given to rose-like formations of crystal clusters of gypsum or barite and Azurite, a soft, deep blue copper mineral produced by weathering of copper ore deposits.

Diane Oulahchoum said they bring in good quality rocks and fossils.

“To hold a piece of history or to own a piece of history is truly amazing,” Diane Oulahchoum. “We’ve been really pleased and we have gotten a lot of repeat business so that’s how we got started.

Farid Oulahchoum said his rocks hail from the Atlas Mountains mines in Morocco, in which miners have no modern technology for excavation. The mines sell stones to dealers like Oulahchoum and the dealers present them in shows in the United States, such as the festival.

“Last year we came to observe,” Diane Oulahchoum said. “This year, we contacted them and said we wanted to be apart of it. So this is our first year as a vendor, but we plan to be back and we have already had people ask us to please bring more next year. This is a good show and this is something good for him (Farid). And for him to have come from Morocco, he loves his North Carolina.”

There were also many young excavation enthusiasts who spent parts of the day digging and panning the reject piles from PotashCorp of Aurora. Children and adults could be seen chipping away at the vast piles in hopes of finding the perfect shark tooth or fossil.

The festival also featured games, arts and crafts, carnival rides and a Confederate encampment, teaching festivalgoers about the South’s role in the Civil War. There was also an auction in which the Aurora Fossil Museum auctioned off fossils, rocks and other precious artifacts to fossil enthusiasts.