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Exciting fossil find on North Carolina beach turned out to be another enormous Megalodon tooth. Plucked from the sandy beach of North Topsail Beach, the finding is credited to Denny Blend.
Exciting fossil find on North Carolina beach turned out to be another enormous Megalodon tooth. Plucked from the sandy beach of North Topsail Beach, the finding is credited to Denny Blend.
Not to forget, part of the credit for the exciting fossil find also goes to the recent storms sweeping the beaches, as well as the recent high tides. Denny Blend likes to spend time on North Topsail Beach. The finding of the Megalodon tooth made the experience all the more interesting. In his words:
“Oh my God, like I said I felt like I was a lottery winner or something. It’s like I’m the first one to touch that since it fell out of its mouth back in the day”.
This isn’t the first Megalodon tooth plucked from the beaches of North Carolina. A real treasure trove filled with such feats, it is no wonder that recently more and more fossilized shark teeth have been washing up ashore. Which is also a feat for paleontologists looking to better understand the ancestor of modern sharks.
If you’ve ever seen an image of a Megalodon, you noticed the scale it occupies compared to a human. Compared to a great white shark, it is estimated to have measured three times more. The exciting fossil finding matches this picture. The six-inch tooth now hosted at the Aurora Fossil Museum is the largest Megalodon tooth found.
Cynthia Crane, working with the museum explained that recent research has helped established the ratio between the teeth of a shark and its size. In the case of Megalodon, every inch the tooth measures translates into ten feet in length. With a six-inch tooth, the Megalodon it belonged to would have been an enormous 60 feet long monster.
A fierce predator, the Megalodon roamed the ocean waters of the Miocene-Pliocene era. The era spans approximately 10 million years, counting from 15 million years ago until 5 million years back. However, paleontologists estimate that the last of Megalodons would have perished 2.6 million years ago.
The exciting fossil find on North Carolina beach and its analysis shows that it is consistent with previous findings concerning the ancestor of the great white shark. If you need another awe-inspiring finding, here it is. The Megalodon’s jaw was three times as strong as that of the well-known Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Despite the Megalodon’s impressive strength and size, it went extinct even after 14 million years of evolution have helped it grow into a larger and fiercer predator.
Photo Credits: Flickr
