An eight-year-old boy who is a fossil hunter and budding paleontologist dug up a giant 4.75-inch tooth of a prehistoric shark that lived 22 million years ago, which experts are calling the “find of a lifetime.”
Budding 8-year-old paleontologist makes incredible discovery
An eight-year-old boy from Lebanon, Pennsylvania, took a vacation with his family to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. While in the Palmetto State, the boy’s family took him on a fossil hunt at the Palmetto Fossil Excursions, an educational fossil-hunting facility in Summerville.
While digging in the dirt, Riley Gracely unearthed an amazing fossil, something the staff called “truly the find of a lifetime!”
Riley went “walking around the bases of these piles of gravel and dirt and noticed what he thought was the edge of a tooth,” said his father, Justin Gracely, Fox reported
Riley was digging in the company’s “premium” gravel layer when he found a 4.75-inch angustidens tooth, the Daily Mail reported.
Tooth is larger than previously found specimens
One thing that makes Riley’s discovery of the huge angustidens tooth is that it is larger than a well-preserved specimen from New Zealand. The beast from which it came was estimated at 31 feet in length, and its teeth measured up to 3.9 inches. At 4.75 inches, the tooth Riley found is significantly larger.
Another boy found a megalodon tooth at a South Carolina beach last summer
Last year, a five-year-old boy from Virginia found a 3.25-inch shark tooth identified as that of a megalodon in the sands of the Ocean Creek resort, Fox reported.
About the prehistoric angustidens shark
Otodus angustidens is a species of prehistoric mega-toothed sharks that lived roughly 33 to 22 million years ago. Angustidens was first identified in 1835. Angustidens is estimated to have grown up to 31 feet in length.
The shark is related to another extinct mega-toothed shark, Otodus megalodon, which lived about 23 to 3.6 million years ago and is a close relative of the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias).
The most recent estimates of length for the megalodon range between 34-66 feet.
By comparison, the largest female great white sharks have been verified up to 20 feet in length and estimated to weigh about 4,200 pounds. Therefore, it’s easy to speculate that angustidens and megalodons would likely weigh twice that amount or more and have massive daily caloric requirements.
