Six-year-old boy finds giant megalodon tooth on Bawdsey beach
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Six-year-old boy finds giant megalodon tooth on Bawdsey beach
A six-year-old boy has found a shark tooth belonging to a giant prehistoric creature that could be up to 20 million years old.
Sammy found the 10cm-long megalodon tooth on Bawdsey beach in Suffolk during a bank holiday break.
It has been confirmed as belonging to a megalodon - the largest shark that ever existed - by expert Prof Ben Garrod.
Sammy's excitement has been shared with his friends at school, and he took the tooth to his beaver cubs group, after which he was awarded the explorer badge, his father said.
Sammy Shelton found the giant tooth on a Suffolk beach
Sammy described the "massive" tooth as his best-ever find, and said it was just laying there on the sand and pebbles. Sammy is so happy with his find that he's sleeping with it near his bed!
Sammy found the tooth on the beach beneath Bawdsey's eroding sandy cliffs while on holiday
The family from Bradwell near Gorleston-on-Sea in Norfolk, were searching for fossils when they came across the giant shark's tooth.
"Sammy was very excited as we'd seen fragments of shark teeth on the beach, but nothing as big and heavy as this," Mr Shelton said.
Photographs of the find were sent to Prof Garrod, a broadcaster and evolutionary biologist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
• The giant creature was a carnivore and had no known predators
• It lived between about 20 million and 1.5 million years ago, long after the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago
• It could eat anything it liked, but its favourite food was whales, although seals would also have been on the menu
• Most of this shark's hunting was in the open sea and it attacked its prey near the surface, when it came up for air
• Megalodon could swim at high speed in short bursts so tended to rush its prey from beneath
Source: BBC Science
"It belonged to a megalodon, the largest ever shark - and its teeth are not often found around the UK coastline," he said.
"Maybe just a handful a year, but this is a particularly good example, in really good condition, whereas they are usually quite worn when found."
The megalodon could grow up to 18m (60ft) in length, scientists estimate, and weigh up to 60 tonnes, he said.
They were "specialist whale eaters," Prof Garrod said. "Not many people who look for a megalodon tooth actually find one," he said.
I've been searching since I was a child and I knew all the beaches around the area - but I still haven't found my megalodon.
The tooth measures about 10cm
The megalodon dominated all the seas around the world other than those parts of the oceans surrounding Antarctica.
The name means "big tooth" and the giants were active from about 22 million years ago until about three million years ago when they became extinct.
- Published9 February 2022
