A Lowcountry professional fossil hunter found a massive 6.45 inch megalodon tooth while scouring a drainage ditch at a Summerville, SC construction site.
It weighed three pounds.
THREE pounds.
Matthew Basak, who guides hunts for Lowcountry Fossil Excursions, noticed a promising spot at a Summerville construction site and started probing the dirt. He found a tooth in the soil and when he removed it, he was astonished to see a 6.45 inch megalodon tooth weighing three pounds.
That’s huge. But it’s not the largest tooth found in the Palmetto State. The current record is 6.5 inches long.
Megalodons, and their megashark relatives, are believed to have died out about 3.6 million years ago.
Summerville is a hotbed for big shark’s teeth.
Paleontologists have recently discovered dozens of juvenile teeth in Summerville that belong to an extinct species of megatoothed shark called Carcharocles angustidens, who swam the seas long before the megalodon made its appearance.
The find, researched by a group from the College of Charleston’s Department of Geology, suggests that the fossil bed may have been a haven for megashark pups some 24 million years ago.
And, everybody knows that South Carolina is rich with fossils because our coastal plains were once covered in water.
Just like today’s great white sharks come to Port Royal Sound to give birth and let their young grow, their Lowcountry megalodon predecessors did the same thing millions of years ago; in the same region.
The oceans are constantly changing and so are the shorelines. Summerville is about 33 miles from the ocean today, and the town was the ocean floor all those years ago.
