A schoolboy out looking for shells on the beach found a huge, prehistoric shark tooth instead.
Sammy Shelton, six, wasn’t expecting to find the four-inch tooth, which is around three million years old.
But he was so pleased with the find that he now sleeps with it next to his bed.
The tooth was found on Bawdsey Beach in Suffolk, a hotspot for fossil hunters – although the finds are often hidden in clay.
It once belonged to a huge shark called a megalodon, whose fins alone were thought to be the size of an adult human.
Now extinct, the shark could grow up to 67 feet long.
Its name means ‘big tooth’, and it had 250 thick teeth designed to grab prey and break its bones, including whales.
Sammy took his ancient fossil into school for show and tell, and has also earned a special ‘explorer’ badge from his local Beavers group since finding the tooth.
His dad Peter Shelton, 60, said: ‘People have said it’s a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.
‘Really we were looking for interesting shells on the beach but instead we got this megalodon tooth.
‘It was huge and very heavy.
‘I knew what it was but it wasn’t until I took it to others looking on the beach that I realised the significance.
‘There was one guy down there who’s been looking all his life for a megalodon tooth and never found anything of this size.’
Evolutionary biologist Ben Garrod, who works at UEA, checked pictures of the tooth and said it was once of just a handful found in Britain each year.
Sammy is now keen to get back down to the beach to dig up more potential fossils.
Peter said: ‘At the moment he’s keeping it by his bedside.
‘He’s taken it into school and to Beavers to show his friends.
‘Sammy wants to go back again. He likes being outside.’
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