Massive megalodon tooth found off Florida coast: What ‘every fossil diver dreams about'
Kristina Scott found a 6-inch megalodon shark tooth while fossil diving in Venice.
She said she's been fossil diving for three years and has found things ranging from mammoth and sperm whale teeth to megalodon teeth.
Scott said she probably has about 100 megalodon teeth in her collection, but that's after 'many, many dives.'
Scott said the biggest megalodon tooth she had ever found before this one was 4 inches long.
The video showed Scott finding the enormous tooth on the sandy ocean floor.
'After I pulled this one up, I knew I had something every other fossil diver dreams about,' Scott said.
According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, megalodon teeth can exceed 7 inches in length.
'I looked up how rare it is to find this size,' she said. '1% of all Megalodon shark teeth found are 6 inches.'
3 Kristina Scott found a 6-inch megalodon shark tooth while fossil diving in Venice.
Facebook/Kristina Scott
3 'After I pulled this one up, I knew I had something every other fossil diver dreams about,' Scott said.
Facebook/Kristina Scott
3 According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, megalodon teeth can exceed 7 inches in length.
Kristina Scott
Megalodon is a massive shark species that lived between 23 and 3.6 million years ago, according to the Smithsonian.
This ancient shark species is about three times the size of the modern great white shark, and is known as the largest shark to ever live.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
There's Something Really Suspicious About the Way This Star Died
Stellar death is a complex and mysterious process — but in the case of a supernova known as 2023zkd, things were more gruesome than any astronomer had ever seen before. As its name suggests, this supernova — the fabulous astronomical term for the explosive death of a star — was first spotted back in 2023, when Southern California's Zwicky Transient Facility zeroed in on it thanks to new AI algorithms designed to detect such brilliant blasts. This supernova, however, was different. It appeared, as explained in a statement by researchers, to be dangerously close to a small black hole — but instead of being ripped asunder, it seems that the supernova began trying to feast upon that which should have destroyed it. Wait, what? In a new paper published in the Astrophysics Journal explains, scientists from Harvard, the Smithsonian, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were taken aback by what they were seeing from 730 million light-years away. Black holes and supernovae are not, as paper author and Harvard professor Ashley Villar told the Washington Post, all that unusual to witness in proximity. Both were once, presumably, stars, and some theories suggest supernovae may even be part of the building blocks for black holes. In the case of SN 2023zkd, things seemed to go haywire long before its gluttonous dance with its black hole partner. The scientists' algorithm initially detected the expected bright burst of light from the supernova — but looking back on archival data, they found that it had actually been brightening slowly for roughly four years, which is much longer than typically seen in supernovae. Even more curiously, SN 2023zkd then brightened unexpectedly while astronomers observed its progress moving forward — a "dramatic re-brightening," as the Center for Astrophysics' statement called it, that seemed to be related to the "thick, disk-like" cloud that was seen near the site of the explosion. "We think that the light source is actually from stuff hitting each other as it's trying to escape," Villar told WaPo. "That explosion hits that disk, and now we're seeing all this additional light." All that escapee debris was, per one theory, looking to get out from the gravitational stress of the supernova's black hole companion. If further analysis confirms this to be the case, it will make this unique supernova activity "some of the clearest signs we've seen of a massive star interacting with a companion in the years before explosion," Villar said in the statement — a euphemistic way of suggesting that it would be the first time scientists have ever seen a supernova try to eat a black hole. While there's a good chance that scientists have seen the aftermath of such strange exchanges between these two types of former stars, technologies like the AI used to find SN 2023zkd will make it all the easier to catch them in the act. "We're now entering an era where we can automatically catch these rare events as they happen, not just after the fact," explained Alexander Gagliano, another of the study's authors and a fellow at the National Science Foundation's Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, in the statement. "That means we can finally start connecting the dots between how a star lives and how it dies, and that's incredibly exciting." More on dead stars: Bizarre "Infinity Galaxy" Could Hold the Secrets of Supermassive Black Holes Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
21 hours ago
- Yahoo
There's Something Really Suspicious About the Way This Star Died
Stellar death is a complex and mysterious process — but in the case of a supernova known as 2023zkd, things were more gruesome than any astronomer had ever seen before. As its name suggests, this supernova — the fabulous astronomical term for the explosive death of a star — was first spotted back in 2023, when Southern California's Zwicky Transient Facility zeroed in on it thanks to new AI algorithms designed to detect such brilliant blasts. This supernova, however, was different. It appeared, as explained in a statement by researchers, to be dangerously close to a small black hole — but instead of being ripped asunder, it seems that the supernova began trying to feast upon that which should have destroyed it. Wait, what? In a new paper published in the Astrophysics Journal explains, scientists from Harvard, the Smithsonian, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were taken aback by what they were seeing from 730 million light-years away. Black holes and supernovae are not, as paper author and Harvard professor Ashley Villar told the Washington Post, all that unusual to witness in proximity. Both were once, presumably, stars, and some theories suggest supernovae may even be part of the building blocks for black holes. In the case of SN 2023zkd, things seemed to go haywire long before its gluttonous dance with its black hole partner. The scientists' algorithm initially detected the expected bright burst of light from the supernova — but looking back on archival data, they found that it had actually been brightening slowly for roughly four years, which is much longer than typically seen in supernovae. Even more curiously, SN 2023zkd then brightened unexpectedly while astronomers observed its progress moving forward — a "dramatic re-brightening," as the Center for Astrophysics' statement called it, that seemed to be related to the "thick, disk-like" cloud that was seen near the site of the explosion. "We think that the light source is actually from stuff hitting each other as it's trying to escape," Villar told WaPo. "That explosion hits that disk, and now we're seeing all this additional light." All that escapee debris was, per one theory, looking to get out from the gravitational stress of the supernova's black hole companion. If further analysis confirms this to be the case, it will make this unique supernova activity "some of the clearest signs we've seen of a massive star interacting with a companion in the years before explosion," Villar said in the statement — a euphemistic way of suggesting that it would be the first time scientists have ever seen a supernova try to eat a black hole. While there's a good chance that scientists have seen the aftermath of such strange exchanges between these two types of former stars, technologies like the AI used to find SN 2023zkd will make it all the easier to catch them in the act. "We're now entering an era where we can automatically catch these rare events as they happen, not just after the fact," explained Alexander Gagliano, another of the study's authors and a fellow at the National Science Foundation's Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, in the statement. "That means we can finally start connecting the dots between how a star lives and how it dies, and that's incredibly exciting." More on dead stars: Bizarre "Infinity Galaxy" Could Hold the Secrets of Supermassive Black Holes Solve the daily Crossword
Gizmodo
5 days ago
- Gizmodo
‘Weird Looking' Otter Poo Reveals an Unexpected Role in Parasite Control
Receiving an unsolicited photo of worm-infested animal poop would make anyone cringe, unless you're a parasite expert like Katrina Lohan. When a colleague sent her a snapshot of a watery pile of feces with a fire-engine red worm inside, she was instantly intrigued. 'She sent this to me and was like, 'I think this is a parasite, are you interested in studying river otters?' And I was like, 'Ooh, I think that's a parasite too. And yes, I am,'' Lohan, a parasite ecologist who leads the Coastal Disease Ecology Laboratory at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), told Gizmodo. Her colleague discovered the otter scat on a dock at the SERC campus on the Chesapeake Bay. Scientists know surprisingly little about river otters that live in tidally influenced coastal areas, but these predators play a vital role in ecosystems. Studying the parasites in their poop would offer valuable insight into their dietary habits and the health of their habitat. So, Lohan teamed up with Calli Wise, a biological research technician at SERC and first author of the new study published in the journal Frontiers in Mammal Science on Thursday, August 14. Wise was particularly well-suited for this study, as she'd already conducted research on river otter latrines. Yes, you read that right, but wipe that image of a tiny, adorable outhouse from your mind. Otter latrines are essentially on-land congregation areas, Wise told Gizmodo. River otters don't just relieve themselves at these hubs but also eat, play, and lounge there. These animals are nocturnal and semi-aquatic, which makes it difficult to observe them in their natural habitat, but researchers can learn a lot from the stuff they leave behind at latrines. Wise and her colleagues hunted for latrines along roughly 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) of the shoreline of the Rhode River, a tidally influenced subestuary of the Chesapeake Bay. 'You're looking for areas of disturbance where it looks like an animal could have gone from the water to land,' Wise explained. 'Actually, beyond just looking, my best sense was my nose. You can kind of smell out a latrine,' she said. Go figure. The researchers collected scat from 18 active latrines and brought it back to the lab. In addition to observing samples under the microscope, they performed DNA analysis using metabarcoding. This DNA sequencing technique involves extracting small snippets of DNA, amplifying them, then comparing them to a database of snippets from known species. This allows researchers to identify species present in complex biological samples. 'This method has never been used on scat left at latrines in general, for diet or parasites,' Wise said. She and her colleagues found DNA from a wide variety of parasites spanning six taxonomic classes in the scat samples. Most of the species they identified infect river otters' prey, but there were also some that infect otters themselves. 'The fact that this method provided such a level of resolution that we could not only figure out what it was they were eating, but also see the parasites in their prey, was really cool,' Lohan said. What's more, the findings suggest that parasites play a key role in river otters' diets. When they infect prey species, their negative impact on the host's health may make it easier for river otters to hunt them, Lohan explained. Thus, these predators may be culling infected individuals from populations of their prey, but confirming this will require further research, she said.
