Jan Bartek - AncientPages.com - A young girl has made the discovery of a lifetime! During a visit to Calvert Beach in Maryland on Christmas Day, nine-year-old Molly Sampson found an ancient tooth from a 50-foot-long megalodon.
Molly shows the megalodon tooth she discovered. Image credit: Alicia Sampson
Alicia Sampson said her daughters Molly and Natalie, had asked for and received insulated waders and fossil sifters so they could go shark tooth hunting further out in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay near the Calvert Cliffs. The result of the beech adventure was the best possible Christmas gift Molly could hope for. Wading in knee-deep waters, that's exactly what she found: a tooth belonging to the now-extinct Otodus megalodon shark species.
"A local marine museum's curator called it a "once-in-a-lifetime kind of find."
The megalodon - ancient Greek for "big tooth" - lived in seas worldwide until it died out at least 3.5 million years ago.
Growing to more than 66ft (20m) long, the species was not only the biggest shark in the world, but one of the largest fish ever to exist.
The tooth Molly found was 5in long, as big as her hand, according to her mother Alicia Sampson, who shared news of the find on Facebook," the BBC reports.
The family took the fossil Molly found to the Calvert Marine Museum to confirm it was what they thought.
"Future paleontologist, Molly, was out searching for fossils on Christmas morning when, what to her wondering eyes appeared…but a huge Megalodon tooth!" the museum wrote on its Facebook page.
"Molly was excited to share her awesome find with our paleontology department last week at the museum!" the post reads. "We love seeing and hearing about the treasures you find along the shore."
The Megalodon tooth is the size of Molly's hand. Image credit: Alicia Sampson
A curator of paleontology at the museum, Stephen Godfrey, said the fossil belonged to the long-extinct species of shark that once prowled the waters and was "one of the largest, if not the largest marine macropredator the world has ever known," CBS News reported.
Model of megalodon shark jaws at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. Credit: Public Domain
The fossil is from the left side an upper jaw, Godfrey also said, adding that the size of the tooth indicated that the shark — considered by scientists to be a "transoceanic superpredator," according to CBS News — would likely have been between 45 and 50 feet long.
"She is really fascinated by them," Molly's mother said of her daughter's love of fossils.
Godfrey told CBS News that Molly's rare find is a "once-in-a-lifetime" discovery. "People should not get the impression that teeth like this one are common along Calvert Cliffs," he said.
Written by Jan Bartek - AncientPages.com Staff Writer
