A captain of a Florida charter boat stated he was just off the coast when he discovered a megalodon tooth measuring more than 6 inches long.
Last year, Captain Michael Nastasio of Black Gold Fossil Charters discovered a 5.87-inch megalodon tooth, but it was dwarfed by the 6.06-inch tooth he discovered last month off the shore of Venice.
Nastasio told the media, “This one I’ll keep forever for sure. I can’t take my eyes off of it.”
Megalodons, the largest shark species ever to sail the oceans, lived between 23 million and 3.6 million years ago.
The tooth, according to Nastasio, was the largest he’d ever found in his ten years of shark tooth hunting in the Venice area.
On the other hand, a 6-year-old boy discovered a 12,000-year-old mastodon tooth while wandering with his family in a Michigan wildlife preserve.
Julian Gagnon, 6, was out strolling with his family at the Dinosaur Hill Nature Preserve on Sept. 6 when he came across an object he initially mistook for a “dragon’s tooth,” according to his parents.
Gagnon told the media, “I just felt something on my foot and I grabbed it up, and it kind of looked like a tooth.”
Gagnon’s parents permitted him to bring his find home, where the family examined it more closely and discovered it was maybe a fossil.
The discovery was recognized as the upper right molar of a juvenile mastodon, a species that lived in Michigan about 12,000 years ago, by the University of Michigan, Museum of Paleontologists.
According to the paleontology museum’s research and collection manager, Adam Rountrey, “Mammoth and mastodon fossils are relatively rare in Michigan, but compared to other places in the United States, there actually have been more occurrences.”