A 9-year-old girl discovered a prehistoric shark tooth in the water while walking with her family on a beach in Calvert Beach, Maryland (United States) on December 25. Specifically, it’s a tooth from a megalodon, a giant aquatic predator that lived at least 3.5 million years ago, reports BBC News.
According to current estimates by archaeologists, it could be up to 16 meters long, twice the size of the great white shark. It is thus considered to be one of the largest and most powerful predators to have ever lived. For now, only fragmentary remains of the megalodon have been found, including mainly teeth. They are the ones that made it possible to deduce its maximum size.
A tooth of 12 centimeters
The tooth found is thus twelve centimeters long. The American girl and her sister are used to walking the beaches in search of shark teeth. They take this hobby from their father, who has been collecting fossils since childhood. According to the mother, who shared her daughter’s discovery on social media, she and her sister had also asked for an insulating outfit for Christmas so that they could go “hunting shark teeth like professionals”.
It was while testing these new outfits that the little girl found this megalodon tooth. She then took it to the local marine museum, which authenticated it. Interviewed by the BBC, Stephen Godfrey, the museum’s curator of paleontology, said it was a fairly rare find in Calvert County. The discovery of the young girl was therefore relayed on the museum’s social networks, which thanked the “future paleontologist” on this occasion.