BBC News
By Sam Cabral
January 10, 2023
Amateur fossil hunters dream of finding the ancient and the rare. One little girl spoke it into existence.
Molly Sampson, nine, was on a Christmas Day visit to Calvert Beach in Maryland, and told her mother she was “looking for a Meg”.
Wading in knee-deep waters, that’s exactly what she found: a tooth belonging to the now-extinct Otodus megalodon shark species.
A local marine museum’s curator called it a “once-in-a-lifetime kind of find”.
The megalodon – ancient Greek for “big tooth” – lived in seas worldwide until it died out at least 3.5 million years ago.