Massive Megalodon tooth found by 11-year-old boy on holiday
Last week, a young lad was enjoying a trip away with his family when he found a tooth belonging to a totally extinct shark.
The Bowers from Pennsylvania were shelling on the beach in Sea Isle City, New Jersey, US, when dad Mike noticed something rather unusual.
And with help from his 11-year-old son Bo, they ended up discovering a massive shark tooth.
Not just any shark tooth either, but it’s believed to have been from a megalodon, the breed that went extinct some 2.5 million years ago.
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The family took their discovery over to the nearby Cape May Whale Watch and Research Centre which described it as a ‘mega rare’ and ‘once in a lifetime beach find’ as it shared an image of the whopper tooth to Facebook.
Mike told WGAL8 that when he’d pulled a shell out of one of the rocks on the beach, there had been a hole in it.
"I looked down and I was just astonished, but I couldn't fit my hand in there,” So of course I'm screaming like a crazy man over there for my son Bo to come running over because of his small hand. And what did you see?"
He held up the tooth to the outlet, impressive due to how well it appears to have stayed intact.
A fossil expert at the Cape May Whale Watch and Research Centre confirmed their find as a tooth belonging to the notorious megalodon shark.
The young lad added: “I was just really excited at first. I was scared to put my hand down to, like, see it.”
And unsurprisingly, Bo plans to keep the tooth – you know what, fair enough, it’s pretty cool.
While it’s not massively rare to find a megalodon tooth (sharks can shed up to 40,000 teeth in a lifetime), it’s fairly uncommon to find one as big and intact as the Bowers did.
Plus, finds like this are said to be usually made in coastal waters in the Southeast of the US, rather than the Northeast.
Having gone extinct millions of years ago, the whopper shark was widely popularised by big old scary monster movies given its, well, whopping size.
The megalodon shark weighed in as much as 30 large great white sharks and would reach lengths of up to 60 feet as they ruled the seas from about 17 million years ago.
The only marine animal to ever outweigh it is the blue whale.
Paleontologists have estimated that the absolute mega animal needed to devour 2,500 pounds of food a day (putting this in simple terms, it would be like eating 3,300 cans of tuna).
As for their teeth, they had plenty of them. They would constantly shed teeth, explaining why scientists (and families like the Bowers) have found hundreds of megalodon teeth in oceans and on beaches all over the world.
Jess Battison