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RESEARCHERS have discovered a giant megalodon tooth deep in the ocean.
A team of researchers found the tooth of the megalodon, a prehistoric shark that went extinct millions of years ago.
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The scientists were able to locate the fossilized tooth on the ocean floor, 1.9 miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, according to Science Alert.
Researchers were scanning the sea from a remotely operated submersible, where they found the tooth in the sand.
They were able to get the fossil to land, where they saw it had a broken tip and serrated edges.
The tooth is said to be 3.6 million years old and was found in a remote area in Hawaii near the Johnston Atoll.
Researchers believe that because it was located on the crest of the ridge, the ocean currents were strong enough to stop sentiment from accumulating.
The tooth was around 2.5 to 2.6 inches which is small for the average megalodon.
The edges of the tooth were almost perfectly preserved, leading scientists to believe that it was not tossed along the ocean.
The megalodon was known to be a robust animal, around 60 feet long, according to the Natural History Museum.
Despite its stature, researchers have only been able to recover its teeth, which are known to be the size of human hands.
To learn more about the extinct predator, researchers have been studying the area to understand its deep-sea geology and biology.
“There are areas of the seafloor, especially deep ocean basins far from the mainland, where little to no sediment deposition occurs for long periods of time,” Tyler Greenfield, a paleontologist at the University of Wyoming, on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“It’s also possible for teeth to be eroded out and reworked into younger sediments, but that probably didn’t happen in this case.”
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