I got a three-million-year-old tooth for my birthday!

I got a surprise on my ninth birthday.

It was contained in a shoe box – to be honest at first I thought I’d got one of those boring presents like trainers or something.

But when I opened it there was something far more interesting inside, although at first glance I must admit it did look like a stone you might find on the beach.

In fact it was a megalodon tooth – more than three million years old. It’s about as big as my hand, which for a single tooth is massive.

Megalodons were so big that they could eat small whales. They were as big as four great white sharks. A man could stand in a Megalodon’s jaw.

I’d been fascinated by megalodons since getting a book on prehistoric creatures called Extinct Animals for Christmas. Then I watched The Meg movie, which is about a megalodon actually being alive today and attacking a science base in the ocean. That was a lot of fun! And a few days before my birthday, I’d been watching Top Ten Biggest Beasts Ever on National Geographic, which featured the megalodon – and they had talked quite a lot about its teeth, which are often the only bits of the shark which have survived.

So this made receiving the tooth extra special.

It’s really cool to imagine how old this tooth is, and that it was once in the mouth of the biggest shark that ever lived. In fact, this tooth would have sliced through a lot of fish!

The next time I was at school I did a ‘show and tell’ to my class and everyone was really interested, including my teacher!

PARENT PERSPECTIVE

The megalodon tooth was from Jurassic Jacks on Amazon, priced just under £40.

I did a bit of research beforehand to check that this would be genuine, and as far as I’m aware this one is. It came in a ‘presentation box’ that’s far too small to actually fit the tooth in and close it. There was also an information sheet included, which was a nice touch. We were pleased with Lucy’s reaction to the tooth – it really caught her imagination. When people asked her what she got for her birthday, this was the first thing she mentioned.

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