A Prince George mother and stepdaughter were exploring the Nechako River just outside of Miworth when they found a prehistoric fossil, last week.
Rachel Shill Cook and her 13-year-old stepdaughter Addison Shill were looking for agates along the Nechako River when they found something unusual.
“Usually when it's a nice day, we want to get out for a little bit and she's really big into finding agates, so we decided to just take the opportunity to do it,” explained Cook, adding that the river was quite low that day so they were able to explore some areas they normally don’t get to see.
Cook said she saw something she thought was an agate but once she scooped it out of the mud, it turned out to be a tooth like structure that looked like a fossil.
She asked her stepdaughter what she thought it might be.
“She says, ‘Well, I don't know, it looks like a shark's tooth, but way bigger,’” said Cook. The pair then decided to post it on social media to see if anyone had any answers.
“Because my thought was actually that it wasn't what I thought it was.”
However, once Cook posted a picture of the object to Questions and Answers of P.G. on Facebook, the overwhelming response was that it was a Megalodon tooth.
A Megalodon is an extinct species of shark that lived approximately 23 to 3.6 million years ago.
“Then I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me privately, but one woman was a paleontologist and she said yeah, you 100 per cent have a Megalodon tooth on your hands.”
Cook has since done some research and spoken with museums in Victoria and Tumbler Ridge, and the feedback she’s been given has been the same, that while megalodons were never in the area the tooth most likely caught a ride on a glacier before ending up buried in the Nechako.
While the fossil is currently sitting in a Tupperware container in her house, Cook says she’d like to eventually donate the tooth somewhere it could be a benefit to science.
“I know that Megalodon teeth from what I've been reading on the internet can be quite common in some places. But to find one here is incredibly rare.”
Cook notes it will be hard to top this experience the next time she and Addison are exploring the river.
“She told me it's probably going to be pretty boring looking for agates now — The Megalodon tooth kind of raises the bar on neat things to find at the river.”
