Fossilized Megalodon Shark Tooth with Barnacle Colony, 4.8 Inches

Neogene, Miocene to Pliocene. A fossil tooth of Otodus megalodon, the largest predatory shark known to science, displayed upright on a custom stand. The broad triangular blade has smoky gray-olive enamel with fine serrations along its cutting edges. Beneath it, a dark chevron-shaped bourlette leads into a heavy black root with two lobes. A crowded row of white acorn barnacles runs along one side of the crown and root, and single barnacles cling near the tip and on the root's far lobe. The barnacles are a much later addition. They likely settled on the tooth after currents uncovered it on the seafloor, so living animals made a home on a fossil millions of years old. The pale shells set against the dark root make for a good display piece. Otodus megalodon lived in warm and temperate oceans around the world from roughly 23 to 3.6 million years ago. Its skeleton was made of cartilage, which rarely fossilizes, so almost all that survives of the animal is its teeth and occasional vertebrae. Like modern sharks, it shed and replaced teeth constantly throughout its life, which is why so many fossil teeth survive. Teeth that wash out of old marine deposits and lie exposed on the seabed or in coastal rivers can be colonized by modern encrusting organisms, barnacles above all. These encrusted examples are popular with collectors because one object holds two moments in time millions of years apart. Item # 204939

Estimate:$400

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