Florida Divers Find Ancient Megalodon Tooth Riddled with Gashes Consistent with Bite Marks

An ancient megalodon tooth was discovered by Florida divers covered in gashes that look a lot like bite marks. An expert explains a likely scenario of how this happened.

Shark tooth hunting and scuba diving business Aquanutz Scuba Diving Charters in Venice, Florida posted photos of the finger-length tooth on Facebook on Monday. The bite marks on the photos, according to Aquanutz, are some of the best they have ever seen on a (meg) megalodon.

Megalodons and the Shark Tooth Capital of the World

An extinct great white shark relative known as a megalodon lived between 23 million and 3.6 million years ago. Due to the lack of a complete skeleton, the megalodon's enormous size is unknown, but it is estimated to have measured between 50 and 60 feet long, making it nearly three times as large as the largest great white shark alive today.

Blair Morrow from Aquanutz, who took the photos, also found the tooth. She claimed that Venice, Florida, where the tooth was discovered, is the world's shark tooth capital.

The Likely Scenario

Morrows said that She pulled up the root that was poking slightly above the ground. When she initially discovered it, she actually believed it to be broken. She didn't realize the gashes were bite marks until she later examined the teeth on the boat.

According to Aquanutz on Facebook, the bite marks on the tooth could be from the shark itself.

The business commented on the social media post by stating that it is most likely that the man lost the tooth and just so happened to chomp on it as it was falling out.

While scientists haven't looked into the deep bite marks on the Aquanutz tooth, self-inflicted bite marks on megalodon teeth have been discovered in the past.

Sharks and Their Teeth

The megalodon had 276 of these enormous teeth, each of which was up to 7 inches long. Like contemporary sharks, the megalodon probably shed its teeth as they got worn or damaged, replacing them several times over the course of its lifespan. Megalodons might just have lost a comparable number of teeth to modern sharks, who can lose over 40,000 in their lifetimes.

In a 2008 study that was published in the Journal of Zoology, researchers estimated that the megalodon's bite force ranged from 108,514 to 182,201 newtons, or 24,395 to 40,960 pounds-force. The modern great white shark's bite force is 10 times less powerful, at only 18,216 newtons.

The most prevalent fossils are megalodon teeth, which have been discovered all over the world.

Megalodon teeth are abundant off the eastern coast of North America, along the coasts, and at the bottom of saltwater rivers and creeks in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida, according to Emma Bernard, curator of the fossil fish collection at the Natural History Museum in London. This is probably partially due to the age of the rocks, but it's also because collectors can go scuba diving for them because the rocks can be easily found on the ocean floor.

Bernard says that off the coast of Morocco and in some areas of Australia, they are also quite common. Even though they are extremely uncommon and frequently of poor quality in the UK, they can be found close to Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex.

These teeth are often found embedded in a fossilized whalebone, Newsweek reports.