A teenage boy has found a petrified shark tooth while snorkelling on Marysville Beach in the St. Clair River. David Wentz was having some fun undersea and he thought he found a strange rock. However thanks to his mom – a Discovery Channel Junkie – he found out it was more than that! So, after all it pays watching Discovery!

The tooth belongs to an extinct species called Carcharodon Megalodon. These animals ceased to exist 2 million years ago and were huge, around 60 feet! These large animals ate whales and large marine creatures.

The man that is now seeing this is Michigan State University palaeontologist Michael Gottfried, who doesn’t think the animal used to live on the lake:

“I suspect that it was probably carried and dropped by a human inhabitant of the region, either in recent historical times, or perhaps by earlier native people in this area,” he said.

“I can’t say just how it came to be in the St. Clair River, but I can assure you that there aren’t any sharks with 3-inch teeth living there now.”

We hope so, Mr Gottfried, we seriously do. Unless this Megalodon is like Flipper and we all can get along.

Those were the news on the Megalodon.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 10:13 am and is filed under Culture & Odd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.