A Pennsylvania family vacationing in New Jersey discovered something prehistoric and rare during their trip to the beach: the fossilized tooth of a megalodon.
Megalodons were enormous sharks that lived approximately 23 to 3.58 million years ago, and a single tooth from the animal can be about the size of an average adult's hand.
Michael Bowers and his 11-year-old son Bo were exploring a jetty in Cape May, New Jersey, when Bowers spotted an opening with an odd looking object jammed inside. He asked Bo — since he has smaller hands — to fish the object out of the opening.
The boy got to work and soon found he was holding a massive megalodon tooth.
“I looked down in there, and I couldn’t believe myself,” Bowers told NJ.com.
He and his family are from Monogahela, Pennsylvania, but regularly take beach vacations to Wildwood, New Jersey. They don't typically find fossils of ancient predators, however.
“It’s on my bucket list of stuff to find,” Bowers told the publication. “My knees were shaking.”
He and his son took the tooth to the Cape May Whale Watch and Research Center where experts confirmed their fossil was the real deal.
The research center's director, Melissa Laurino, told the outlet that megalodons were the largest carnivorous sharks to ever inhabit the world's oceans. The creatures could grow up to 60 feet in length.
While it’s not uncommon to find shark teeth along the Atlantic coast, discovering a megalodon tooth is rare. Many of the discoveries come from further south at Maryland's Calvert Cliffs, which is a popular spot for fossil hunting.
According to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, so many teeth are found in the area because many of the waters sharks used to inhabit in the past are now inland areas. Where they swam in the past, humans walk today.
Back in New Jersey, Bowers is having to rethink his next trip; he'd intended to travel to North Carolina and rent a scuba suit to try to hunt for a megalodon tooth, but he and his son have made the journey moot.
He said the discovery left his son speechless.
“I never in a million years would have guessed that we would have found something like this," he wrote. "My son was speechless.”
Laurino told NJ.com that the discovery is a “once-in-a-lifetime beach find that the Bowers family will treasure for a lifetime.”
