An 11-year-old boy made a once-in-a-lifetime discovery after finding an ancient elephant tooth right on the beach.
The day of the big find, May 24, Charlie Orchard-Lisle was walking with his mother along East Lane beach in Bawdsey, a Suffolk coastal village in eastern England 75 miles from London, when he spotted the rock-like object on the shoreline.
The discovered tooth, which measures four inches in width, was confirmed as the upper left molar of an Anancus arvernensis.
The extinct mammal walked the Earth from the Late Miocene era to the Early Pleistocene, roughly 8.5–2 million years ago.
A six-ton relative of the African bush elephant, and originally mis-classified in 1828 as a Mastodon with straight, uncurved tusks), it reached a shoulder height of around 8ft.
“We were walking along and, ten minutes before, my son Charlie was saying how much he loves elephants,” Charlie’s mom Eleanor told SWNS news.
Then, they spotted something sticking out of the lapping waves.
“It must have been quite distinctive because it caught both our eyes, so we picked it up.
“We could tell it was something different. It had a different feel to it.
“It is quite incredible.
“I can’t believe you can find something so old on the beach.”
An image of the tooth was shared with Professor Adrian Lister, a research leader in paleontology at the Natural History Museum in London who confirmed its origin.
They believe the tooth may have been buried in the red crag cliff at Bawdsey and was flushed out by erosion.
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