Maryland 9-year-old finds a “once in a lifetime” megalodon tooth

A young man who wanted to become a palaeontologist found the most amazing thing on Christmas morning: a huge 5-inch megalodon tooth.

Molly Sampson, a fourth-grader from Prince Frederick, Maryland, made the amazing find on Calvert Beach.

Molly told us that her father’s love of fossils led her to spend years looking for shark teeth on the beaches of Maryland.

“They’re just cool because they’re very old,” she said.

Molly’s mother, Alicia Sampson, said, “My daughter has always loved exploring the outdoors.” “She likes finding hidden gems,” she said.

Alyssa Sampson said that Calvert Cliffs State Park in Maryland is famous for being a great place to find fossils.

Molly asked her parents for cold-water boots for Christmas so she could go fossil hunting for shark teeth and other things in the Chesapeake Bay. She set out at 9:30 a.m. with her new tools to find the bones of extinct animals.

“I saw something big that looked like a shark tooth,” she said. We were about knee-deep in water.

She also said that she tried to grab the teeth with a picking tool but failed because it was too big. When she saw how big the tooth was, she was “amazed.” “I was thrilled and shocked,” she said.

When the Sampsons took their interesting find to the Calvert Marine Museum, palaeontology curator Stephen Godfrey proved what they already knew: it was a megalodon tooth, from a huge shark that lived more than 23 million years ago.

If we believe what Godfrey told us, each year only five or six megalodon teeth the size of Molly’s are found along the Calvert Cliffs.

Some people will spend their whole lives looking for a tooth the size of Molly’s.

Once in a lifetime, something like this find is made.

He also said that Calvert Cliffs has 100 megalodon teeth for amateur fossil hunters to find every year. However, most of them are much smaller than Molly’s huge tooth. The biggest megalodon teeth that have ever been found were just over 7 inches long.

The tooth was big enough to tell that this megalodon was between 45 and 50 feet long.

According to Godfrey, whales and dolphins would have lived in the water off of Calvert Cliffs millions of years ago, giving megalodons a vast source of food. Shark teeth are “by far the most abundant vertebrate fossil” because sharks replace their teeth many times during their lives and the enamel on their teeth is very strong.

For millions of years, megalodons were the “apex predator on Earth,” which is why people are so interested in them.

Alicia and Godfrey Sampson said they hoped Molly’s finding would inspire other kids, especially girls, to follow their interests in science.

“This will inspire people of all ages, including children, to follow their natural inclination in nature, art, music, or any of the other options we have right now,” Godfrey said.

Alicia Sampson says that kids from all over the world have written letters to Molly telling her how happy they are about what she found. She made an Instagram page to share pictures of her girls’ day trips outside.

She said, “We really want to interact with other kids and encourage them to enjoy doing things outside.”

Molly’s room will have a shadowbox with the huge tooth on show. She wants to study palaeontology in the future.