One cool thing about living so near the beaches is that if I feel like going for a leisurely walk on the beach to look for shells and other treasures, I can. I’ve found sand dollars and live starfish and all manner of pretty shells. I do not usually come across sharks’ teeth here, though we did used to find them all of the time in the creek beds near our house in Gainesville, FL. Those were tiny, though.

The tooth that 9-year-old Grant Johnson found at Egmont Key was 5-inches-long and 4 1/2-inches-wide. Now, THAT is a tooth! It turns out that what the boy first thought was a piece of driftwood is a megalodon tooth. A megalodon is a massive relative of the great white shark. They were up to 60 feet long and some weighed as much at 77 tons. And, they have been extinct for about 2-million years.

I saw a megalodon display at the Florida Museum of Natural History when I still lived in Gainesville. Now, it might be cool if I could follow up that experience by finding a tooth out here on the beaches myself.