A Pennsylvania dad and his 11-year-old son went looking for seashells on the Jersey Shore and came home with something a little more impressive: a 4-inch fossilized tooth from a megalodon, the largest shark that ever lived.
Michael Bowers, 42, and his son Bo were exploring a rocky jetty near Townsends Inlet in Sea Isle City on August 11 when Mike spotted something stuck in a narrow crevice at low tide. His hand was too big to reach it, so he called Bo over. The boy pulled out a heavy, dark, serrated tooth with a clear chip on one edge.
“I never in a million years would have guessed that we would have found something like this,” Mike told reporters. “My son was speechless.” He later admitted his knees were shaking.
The family, who usually vacation in nearby Wildwood, had made the short drive to Sea Isle City that day simply because the weather looked better there. They had no idea the object in Bo’s hand was millions of years old.
Experts at the Cape May Whale Watch and Research Center confirmed it was a genuine megalodon tooth. On the drive home, the Bowers family stopped at the New Jersey State Museum, where curator Dana Ehret also verified the find and called its condition unusually good for anything recovered on a New Jersey beach.
Megalodon teeth are rare in the state. The right sediments simply aren’t exposed near the surface, and museum records show fewer than five previous beach finds. This one appears to be only the sixth. Researchers believe the tooth was likely pumped ashore with sand during a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers beach replenishment project completed in July.
Megalodon, which swam the oceans from roughly 23 million to 3.6 million years ago, could grow to 50 or 60 feet long. Its teeth were built to handle large prey, and the chip on this specimen is consistent with the kind of wear that would come from biting into bone.
Mike, a scuba diver who’d always wanted to find a megalodon tooth, called it a bucket-list moment. Bo plans to keep it.
What started as a quiet afternoon of shelling turned into one of the more unexpected summer stories on the Jersey Shore—a reminder that even familiar beaches can still surprise you.
