Nine-year-old finds megalodon tooth on Maryland beach

On Christmas day, nine-year-old Molly Sampson discovered a tooth belonging to a megalodon shark after telling her mother she was ‘looking for a meg’. 

During a visit to Calvert Beach in Maryland, USA, Molly and her sister Natalie waded into the shallows wearing the insulated waders they both received for Christmas. According to the girls’ mother, Alicia Sampson, her daughters wanted waders for Christmas so that they could ‘go shark tooth hunting like the professionals’. 

Molly had previously found over 400 shark teeth but none so rare as the 5-inch-long tooth submerged in knee-deep water that she found that day. 

The family took the tooth to the Calvert Marine Museum whose palaeontology department confirmed that the tooth belonged to the now-extinct Otodus megalodon shark species. 

This species of shark, which grew to about 20m long, is one of the largest fish ever to have existed and lived in seas worldwide until its extinction 3.5 million years ago (a great white shark grows to about 5m). 

‘People should not get the impression that teeth like this one are common along Calvert Cliffs’, Stephen Godfrey, the museum’s curator of palaeontology, said. He described it as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime kind of find’ and the museum duly congratulated Molly, ‘the future palaeontologist’, on Facebook.

‘[Molly] always wanted to find a “Meg”’, Mrs Sampson told CBS, ‘But for whatever reason, she spoke it into existence on Christmas morning.’