A team of ocean explorers has found a shark tooth that can be traced back millions of years to a time when huge predators roamed the sea.
The Nautilus team described the tooth they found as a “great discovery” in a statement. While the researchers don’t share an exact size, the photo of the tooth in the human hand looks pretty impressive. This oversized specimen was tucked under a ferromanganese coating. Nodules of manganese minerals in seawater can accumulate both inside and around shark teeth.
Earlier, the Natural History Museum in London shared an image of a manganese nodule around a shark tooth found in 1875. “Manganese nodules grow at a rate of only ~2 mm per million years, making them one of the slowest geological processes we know of. This means that if a nodule reaches a radius of 50 mm, it could be 25 million years old,” the museum said in a statement.
The potential age and large size of the tooth found by Nautilus may provide clues to its origin story. “We believe it belongs to the extinct megalodon, but only time (and more lab analysis) will tell,” the team said. Megalodon was a massive apex predator that went extinct millions of years ago. Scientists have discovered that it may have eaten prey the size of today’s killer whales. He sure needs big teeth for big meals like this.
The fossil find came from an expedition to Johnston Atoll, part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, located west of Hawaii. The remote-controlled vehicle of the Nautilus team, Hercules, found this tooth in a sample taken from a depth of 3,089 meters without knowing that it had a tooth inside…
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