11-Year-Old Finds 6th Recorded Megalodon Tooth on New Jersey Beach

Q: What massive creature did this megalodon tooth bite into before ending up wedged in a New Jersey jetty millions of years later?

No one can know exactly what that tooth bit. Experts quoted in reports said the large chip on the tooth likely happened when the megalodon bit into bone, but the specific prey animal cannot be identified from the tooth alone. What scientists can say is that megalodon commonly preyed on large marine animals. Fossil evidence shows its teeth and bite marks on whale bones, and researchers also say megalodons fed on dolphins, dugongs and other sizable sea mammals. One cited study described a whale skull with damage consistent with a head-on attack from a megalodon or a closely related giant shark. So the most evidence-based answer is that the tooth probably struck the bone of a large marine animal—quite possibly a whale or another marine mammal—but anything more specific would be speculation. As for how it reached a New Jersey jetty, museum experts said the tooth likely did not originate in the rocks themselves. It may have come from older offshore marine sediments and been moved by erosion, storms, dredging or beach replenishment before ending up wedged between the jetty stones, where Bo Bowers found it.

3 articles · Updated · Fox News · Aug 17

Bo Bowers, 11, pulled a megalodon tooth from between rocks at Sea Isle City near Townsend Inlet on Aug. 11 while searching for seashells with his father.
New Jersey State Museum staff later verified the fossil as a genuine Otodus megalodon tooth, with Dana Ehret saying it is in extraordinarily good condition for a New Jersey find.
Mike Bowers said museum officials told the family only five megalodon teeth had previously been recorded on New Jersey beaches, making this discovery the sixth; the family was allowed to keep it because it was found on a public beach.
Megalodons were the largest predatory sharks in Earth's history and went extinct about 4 million years ago, making such beach finds in New Jersey highly uncommon because the right-aged sediments are rarely exposed.