Megalodon Tooth Covered in Bite Marks Discovered Off Florida Coast

An ancient megalodon tooth covered in bite marks has been found by divers in Florida.

On Monday, Aquanutz Scuba Diving Charters, a scuba diving and shark tooth hunting company in Venice, Florida, shared pictures of the finger-length tooth on Facebook. "Some of the best bite marks we've seen on a meg," Aquanutz wrote in the post's caption.

Megalodons, an extinct relative of the great white shark, lived around 23 million to 3.6 million years ago. The enormous size of the megalodon is not known, as a full skeleton has not been found, but it is thought to be between 50 and 60 feet long—nearly three times the size of the largest modern-day great white sharks.

The tooth was found by Aquanutz's Blair Morrow, who took the pictures. Venice, where the tooth was found, is "the shark tooth capital of the world," she told Newsweek.

"Part of its root was sticking up a bit, and I pulled it up. I actually thought it was broken when I first found it. It was until looking at it later on the boat that I realized it was bite marks," Morrow said.

The marks on the tooth may be bite marks from the shark itself, Aquanutz said on Facebook.

"Most likely this guy lost the tooth & happened to chomp down on it while it was falling out," the company said in a comment under the Facebook post.

While the deep marks in the Aquanutz tooth have not been investigated by scientists, megalodon teeth with self-inflicted bite marks have been found before.

These huge teeth, of which the megalodon had 276, measured up to 7 inches long. The megalodon, like modern-day sharks, likely shed its teeth when they were worn out or damaged, replacing them multiple times throughout their lives. Modern sharks can get through over 40,000 teeth in their lifetimes, so megalodons may have lost a similarly large number of teeth.

Scientists estimated in 2008 that the bite force of a megalodon was extremely powerful: between 108,514 to 182,201 newtons (24,395 to 40,960 pound-force). By comparison, the bite force of a modern great white shark is only 18,216 newtons, 10 times weaker.

Megalodon teeth are some of the most common fossils and have been found all over the world.

1 of 2

"We can find lots of their teeth off the east coast of North America, along the coasts and at the bottom of saltwater creeks and rivers of North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida," Emma Bernard, the fossil fish collection's curator at London's Natural History Museum, said in a museum blog post.

These teeth are often found embedded in a fossilized whalebone.

Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about megalodons? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.