Ancient Shark Tooth Found… ON a North Texas High School Campus?
To quote Roy Scheider's character Sheriff Brody from Jaws 2, "I know what a shark looks like - cause I've seen one up close"! When you spend summers surfing along the Jersey Shore like I did as a kid, at some point you're likely to wind up in the vicinity of a shark.
But who expects to find a shark tooth in the Dallas suburb of Plano? That's exactly what a couple of Plano West High School biology students dug up in a creek bed their class was exploring.
TexasHillCountry.com reports one of the teachers supervising the project thought the find was merely an old chicken bone. The future scientists didn't buy it, so they went to another faculty member on the scene for a 2nd opinion & he confirmed it was likely a shark tooth. Experts later said the prehistoric tooth was probably from the mouth of an 18-foot shark that lived 25-million years ago.
I did have to half-chuckle & roll my eyes when the writer characterized the recovered shark's tooth as "not shockingly big", noting it was "only" slightly larger than a penny. Referring back to my own "closer-than-comfortable-coastal-encounter" all those years ago, trust me- even "just" a 6-footer, which was about the size of the one that swam within 10 feet of me late one afternoon, can do serious damage if it sinks those teeth into you!