Huge Tooth Dredged from Chesapeake ‘Not a Fossil’

When a St. Mary’s County, Maryland waterman brought a 5.5-inch-long tooth he dredged up with a catch of oysters to experts at the Patuxent Maritime Museum, they quickly concluded it was the fossilized tooth of an exceptionally large megalodon.

Now, in a newly published paper in marine biology periodical Quint Review, scientists from New England’s Amity Institute refute that finding.

According to lead Amity researcher Larry Vaughn, “In a fossil, minerals fill in and replace most of the original organic material. Electron microscopy shows this specimen is 98.6 percent organic.”

Megalodon is an extinct species of shark that lived approximately 23 to 3.6 million years ago. Regarded as one of the largest and most powerful predators to have ever lived, the megalodon were five times as large as today’s largest great white sharks.

“The process of fossilization is a slow one that usually takes tens of thousands of years. We estimate this tooth is less than 100 years old,” the Quint Review paper concludes.

Amity Institute researchers wouldn’t speculate where the enormous tooth originated, but associate professor Matthew Hooper said the Chesapeake waterman’s specimen was, “easily five times bigger than the largest great white shark tooth ever found.”

“We aren’t saying it came from a Megalodon,” Hooper told The Montgonion. “We are saying that whatever it came from, could still be swimming nearby.”