A father and son made an astonishing discovery while on a beach vacation in New Jersey. Michael Bowers, 42, of Monongahela, Pennsylvania, was out for a walk in Sea Isle City with his 11-year-old son Bo on Tuesday when they thought they spotted something through a narrow crevice down by the shoreline. Michael said that his hand wouldn’t fit through, so Bo reached in instead. The boy then pulled out the tooth of a megalodon, the largest shark ever to have swum the planet’s waters, thought to have grown up to 60 feet in length and to have gone extinct at least 3.6 million years ago. “I always seem like I find crazy stuff in the water,” Michael later said. “I never in a million years would have guessed that we would have found something like this. My son was speechless.” The tooth is likely to have washed up as the result of a July “replenishment project” by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “If the sand came from a few miles offshore, it is very possible the tooth came with it,” researcher Melissa Laurino said. “It is a once-in-a-lifetime beach find that the Bowers family will treasure for a lifetime.”
