A Pennsylvania father and his 11-year-old son made an extraordinarily rare discovery on the Jersey Shore: a fossilized tooth from a megalodon, the massive prehistoric shark that has been extinct for about 3.6 million years.
Michael Bowers, 42, and his son, Bo, from Monongahela, Pennsylvania, were vacationing in Sea Isle City when they spotted something unusual while exploring a jetty near Townsends Inlet. The family regularly vacations in Wildwood, but this was their first visit to Sea Isle City.
Bowers noticed an opening in the rocks and looked inside. But there was a problem: His hand couldn't fit through the narrow gap.
So he called his son over.
Bo's smaller hand could reach inside.
Moments later, the father and son were staring at a fossilized tooth.
“I looked down in there, and I couldn’t believe myself,” Bowers told NJ.com.
The two brought their discovery to the Cape May Whale Watch and Research Center, which confirmed that the tooth belonged to a megalodon.
For Bowers, the discovery was especially meaningful. Finding a megalodon tooth had already been on his bucket list.
“It’s on my bucket list of stuff to find,” he told NJ.com. “My knees were shaking.”
Bo was excited, too, although he admitted he was initially nervous about reaching into the opening.
“I was just really excited at first. I was scared to put my hand down to, like, see it,” Bo told WGAL.
A tooth from a prehistoric giant
The tooth belonged to a megalodon, a prehistoric predator that researchers say could grow to about 60 feet long. Melissa Laurino, research director and naturalist at the Cape May Whale Watch and Research Center, said scientists consider megalodons the largest carnivorous sharks to have inhabited the world's oceans.
The discovery was remarkable not only because of the creature it came from but also because of where the tooth was found.
Megalodon fossils are scarce along the New Jersey coast.
Dana Ehret, curator of natural history at the New Jersey State Museum, said the museum has documented fewer than five megalodon teeth found in New Jersey.
WGAL reported that while shark teeth themselves aren't necessarily unusual — sharks can shed thousands of teeth during their lifetimes — large and intact megalodon specimens are particularly uncommon. Such discoveries are more typically made in coastal waters in the Southeast than in the Northeast.
That made the Bowers family's beach find something considerably more special than an ordinary fossil.
How did a 3.6-million-year-old tooth get there?
Researchers believe the answer may be connected to a modern beach replenishment project.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed the Sea Isle City portion of a beach replenishment project in July. Laurino said an offshore dredging operation could have brought the fossil ashore along with sand pumped in from the ocean floor.
“If the sand came from a few miles offshore, it is very possible the tooth came with it,” Laurino told NJ.com.
Laurino described the discovery as:
“a once-in-a-lifetime beach find that the Bowers family will treasure for a lifetime.”
For Bowers, the discovery was even more remarkable because he had already planned another trip in search of the same prehistoric treasure.
He had intended to travel to North Carolina to scuba dive off the coast and search for megalodon teeth buried on the seafloor.
Instead, he found one during a family vacation in New Jersey — with his son beside him.
“I always seem like I find crazy stuff in the water,” Bowers told NJ.com. “I never in a million years would have guessed that we would have found something like this. My son was speechless.”
For Bo, the tooth is something he plans to keep.
And for his father, the discovery turned an ordinary beach outing into something far more memorable: a rare piece of a prehistoric world, uncovered not by a professional fossil hunter but by a father and son who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
The megalodon has been gone for millions of years. But one of its teeth gave Michael and Bo Bowers a story they found together — and one they are unlikely to forget.
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