Tooth Protruding From Ocean Floor Belonged to Extinct Sea Creature 3.5 Million Years Ago, Scientists Say

It’s a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. Only this was a tooth at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Knewz.com has learned this is not your ordinary tooth. Researchers have discovered a tooth that they estimate is at least 3.5 million years old.

A red circle indicates where the megalodon tooth was found. By: TandFOnline.com

Scientists say it’s from an Otodus megalodon, a kind of deep-sea shark that is now extinct.

The megalodon may have become extinct because it lost battles for food with great white sharks. Fossilized teeth from megalodons have washed ashore on beaches around the world.

But according to the journal Historical Biology, it’s rare to find a tooth like that sticking out of the sand on the ocean floor. It was upright. In scientific language, it’s in situ.

In a paper published Thursday, December 14, researchers report a remote-controlled underwater vehicle found the tooth in the central Pacific and pulled it out in the summer of 2022, according to the journal.

The Science Alert website notes it was hard to spot because it was surrounded by rocks. But it was found about 220 miles southeast of Johnston Atoll and hundreds of miles southeast of Hawaii.

Hurricane Dora in August 1999 missed Johnston Atoll by about 65 miles. By: MEGA

The tooth apparently landed more than 9,500 feet below sea level because of an undersea volcano. The research team that found it guesses the volcano was active at least 55 million years ago.

The tooth is not large, measuring about two-and-a-half inches long with a slightly shorter width. But it’s sharp.

Several views of the megalodon tooth pulled from the Pacific Ocean floor. By: By: TandFOnline.com

“The well-preserved serration of the cutting edges suggests that the tooth did not undergo large transportation or drifting,” the journal report says.

In other words, sediment from the ocean floor did not damage the tooth very much.

“There are areas of the seafloor, especially deep ocean basins far from the mainland, where little or no sediment deposition occurs for long periods of time,” said University of Wyoming scientist Tyler Greenfield.

The crew of the exploration vessel Nautilus stumbled onto the tooth, in a way. It was studying the central Pacific to find new details about the region’s biology and geology.

The researchers add that the discovery “highlights the importance of using advanced deep-diving technologies to survey the largest and least explored parts of our ocean.”

The megalodon tooth now is held for research at the University of Rhode Island. The Phys.org website noted the Nautilus project is in coordination with a German zoology collection.

Megalodons have become a hot TikTok topic in recent weeks. A series of videos posted since late August claimed NASA held the last living one, as a result of deep-sea explorations in the 1970s.

A series of recent TikTok videos made wild claims about megalodons. By: MEGA

One video viewed more than 26 million times claims George Meyer of Houston found a giant cage labeled “Zone F” off the coast of Maryland in April.

Then Meyer supposedly noticed “the silhouette of a shark” as he returned to the surface, estimated to be 70 feet long.

But the SyFy website concluded the videos are almost completely fake. Especially if scientists are right and megalodons have been extinct for millions of years.

Besides, the “Forgotten Combo” TikTok channel describes itself as offering “fun and fictional mythical creature stories.”