Amateur fossil hunter Phil Mullaly was exploring Jan Juc in south Australia's Victoria's Surf Coast when he noticed a shark's tooth poking out of a boulder on the beach. According to paleontologists at Museums Victoria, that tooth and two others found are 25-million-years-old and came from a Great Jagged Narrow-Toothed Shark (Carcharocles angustidens), a species that could be as much as 30 feet long. From CNN:
"If you think about how long we've been looking for fossils around the world as a civilization — which is maybe 200 years — in (that time) we have found just three (sets of) fossils of this kind on the entire planet, and this most recent find from Australia is one of those three," (Museums Victoria researcher Erich) Fitzgerald told CNN…
"That doesn't happen. That just doesn't happen. That's only happened once before in Australia, and that was a totally different species of shark," he said.
When Mullaly told him the boulder he found was still on the beach, Fitzgerald said "my jaw sort of dropped."
"Man stumbles upon rare 25-million-year-old teeth of mega-toothed shark" (CNN)
