An American schoolgirl has discovered the fang of an ancient megalodon shark from the beach in North Carolina. The finding is considered very significant as megalodon sharks were supposed to have ruled the oceans millions of years ago.
"I'm looking around and I see something buried in the sand. I uncovered it and it keeps coming and it's this big tooth and then I hold it up and I'm screaming for my mom," Avery Fauth, the girl who discovered the teeth told WECT.
Avery Fauth's father revealed that his family is very much interested in shark tooth searching, but until now, he has not discovered anything in his life.
"I was pretty surprised that she found one. I've been looking for 25 years and I haven't found anything. I was really shocked and excited for her that she found something that big," said Avery's father.
Megalodon is widely considered one of the largest marine predators and the length of its teeth could reach as long as 20 centimeters. Experts believe that due to struggle for territory between the white shark and the Megalodon, the latter were wiped out from the oceans around 2.6 million years ago.
However, a recent study report published in the Journal of Life and Environmental Sciences had revealed that the giant shark megalodon might have gone extinct at least one-million-year earlier than previously thought. As per researchers who took part in this study, the last megalodon died around 3.6-million-years later, a finding that reshaped human understanding about marine history.
"The extinction of O megalodon was previously thought to be related to this marine mass extinction-but in reality, we now know the two are not immediately related. Rather, it is possible that there was a period of faunal turnover, many species becoming extinct and many new species appearing rather than a true immediate and catastrophic extinction caused by an astronomical cataclysm like a supernova," said Sarah Bossnecker, of the University of Leicester, upi.com reports.
