Mike Bowers spotted the opening in the rock first. Something was jammed inside — he could see it but couldn't reach it. His hands were too big.

So he did what any reasonable father would do. He started screaming for his 11-year-old.

"I was screaming like a crazy man over there for my son Bo to come running over because of his small hand," Mike told reporters.

Bo ran over. He was scared to put his hand in at first. Then he pulled out a fossilized megalodon tooth nearly the size of his whole hand — a shark tooth more than 3 million years old, pulled from a rock jetty in Sea Isle City, New Jersey, on August 11.

"I was like shocked and like excited at the same time," Bo said.

The family — from western Pennsylvania — had originally planned to spend the day in Wildwood but switched to Sea Isle City when the weather turned overcast. They were looking for shells. They found something considerably older than a shell.

They took the tooth to both the New Jersey State Museum and the Cape May Whale Watch and Research Center. Both confirmed it immediately. Megalodon tooth. Real, intact, enormous.

"It's an amazing sighting. That family's really lucky," said Daniel Iovino of the Cape May Whale Watch and Research Center. "There's only a handful of recorded findings of megalodon teeth off of New Jersey's coastline."

The Bowers family is keeping it. Found on a public beach, it's legally theirs.

Mike had actually been planning a separate trip to North Carolina — he was going to rent scuba gear specifically to hunt for a megalodon tooth. He can cancel that reservation now.

What Megalodon Actually Was

The word megalodon gets thrown around a lot, usually attached to horror movies and the vague suggestion that maybe one is still out there somewhere. It isn't. But what it actually was is more impressive than any movie version.

Otodus megalodon was the largest predatory shark in Earth's history — and arguably the most formidable ocean predator to have ever existed. They grew to an estimated 50 to 60 feet long. For comparison, a great white shark tops out around 20 feet. A megalodon was three times that. Their jaws were large enough to swallow a small car. Their bite force has been estimated at somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 pounds per square inch — the most powerful bite of any animal ever studied, living or extinct.

They lived from roughly 23 million years ago until their extinction about 3.6 million years ago, ruling warm shallow seas across most of the planet. Their diet consisted primarily of whales, dolphins, large fish, and sea turtles. Nothing in the ocean during their era was safe from them.

A single megalodon could shed up to 40,000 teeth over its lifetime — which sounds like a lot until you consider that sharks continuously replace their teeth in conveyor-belt fashion throughout their lives, cycling through row after row of replacement teeth. That's actually part of why megalodon teeth show up in the fossil record so frequently compared to other ancient sharks — the sheer volume of teeth produced means there are more to find.

Why Finding One in New Jersey Is Unusual

Megalodon teeth turn up regularly along the Atlantic coast — particularly in the Southeast. South Carolina, North Carolina, Maryland, and Florida are well-known hunting grounds, with rivers and coastal waterways that expose fossil-rich Miocene and Pliocene sediment during low water or after storms.

New Jersey is a different story. The shoreline geology doesn't expose the same fossil layers as often, and most of the New Jersey coast has been heavily altered by development, dredging, and beach replenishment projects that bury natural sediment. Experts think the Sea Isle City tooth may have been dredged up from the ocean floor during a beach replenishment project and deposited in the rocks along the jetty — essentially delivered from deeper prehistoric sediment by the machines trying to rebuild the beach.

Which means Bo Bowers didn't just find a megalodon tooth. He found one that had been sitting in ancient ocean sediment for more than 3 million years, got accidentally scooped up and deposited in a rock jetty by modern construction equipment, and then waited for an 11-year-old with small enough hands to come along on a cloudy Tuesday.

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