An 11-year-old Pennsylvania boy has spoken out about pulling a massive megalodon tooth from a New Jersey rock jetty.
Bo Bowers, 11, and his father Mike were shelling on Sea Isle City beach last week when the pair made the prehistoric discovery. The Bowers family, from the Pittsburgh area, had been enjoying a summer vacation along the Jersey Shore when dad Mike noticed something unusual wedged inside a rock.
“I looked down and I was just astonished, but I couldn’t fit my hand in there,” Mike told WGAL8. “So of course I’m screaming like a crazy man over there for my son Bo to come running over because of his small hand.”
The elder Bowers had been pulling shells from the rocks when he spotted the object through a hole. With Bo’s smaller hands, the 11-year-old was able to reach inside and extract the fossil. The tooth measured roughly four inches and appeared remarkably intact for its age.
“I was just really excited at first. I was scared to put my hand down to, like, see it,” Bo said in his interview with WGAL8.
The family took their find to the Cape May Whale Watch and Research Center, where fossil experts confirmed it belonged to Otodus megalodon, the largest shark species ever to exist. The research center described the discovery as a “mega rare” and “once in a lifetime beach find” in a Facebook post sharing an image of the tooth.
Mike Bowers, an avid scuba diver, said Pittsburgh that finding a megalodon tooth had long been on his personal bucket list. He noted the element of chance that made the discovery possible.
“We had to be in the right place at the right time with perfect timing,” he said. “Because if it wasn’t low tide, I would have never found it.”
The tooth bore visible signs of its ancient owner’s powerful bite. “This big chip on the end, they say it was probably from it biting into something, hitting the bone and it chipped it,” Mike Bowers explained.
While megalodon teeth are not entirely uncommon finds globally—ancient sharks shed up to 40,000 teeth in a lifetime—discoveries of this size and completeness are rare, particularly in the Northeastern United States. Such fossils are more frequently found in coastal waters of the Southeast.
In the viral moment that followed the authentication, the Cape May Whale Watch and Research Center’s social media post drew widespread attention to the family’s beach discovery. The center’s experts dated the tooth to the era when megalodons ruled the oceans, between roughly 23 million and 3.6 million years ago.
The megalodon dwarfed modern great white sharks, growing up to 60 feet long and weighing as much as 50 tons—equivalent to approximately 30 large great whites. Paleontologists estimate the apex predator consumed around 2,500 pounds of food daily. Only the blue whale has ever outweighed it among marine animals.
The Bowers family plans to keep the tooth as a vacation souvenir. Bo’s successful extraction of the fossil from the rock jetty has made him the latest in a small but growing number of young amateur fossil hunters to make headlines with prehistoric discoveries on American beaches.