An 11-year-old English boy recently stumbled onto a 1.8 million-year-old fist-sized tooth from a now-extinct elephant while walking on the beach with his family.
The eagle-eyed kid, Charlie Orchard-Lisle, spotted the rock-like object along the shoreline of East Lane beach in Bawdsey, a quaint coastal village in Suffolk, England, in May — just as he was talking about his love of elephants, according to local UK outlet South West News Service.
“We were walking along and could see this thing by the lapping waves,” the boy’s mother, Eleanor, told the outlet.
“It must have been quite distinctive because it caught both our eyes — we could tell it was something different, it had a different feel to it,” she said.
What they found was an upper left molar belonging to an Anancus avernensis — a now-extinct relative of the African bush elephant that walked the earth nearly 2 million years ago, according to paleontology Professor Adrian Lister at the Natural History Museum in London.
The tooth is 4 inches wide, with its enamel preserved and mineralized over hundreds of thousands of years, the outlet reported.
Erosion likely freed the tooth from the area’s fossil-rich Red Crag cliffs, a geological formation running along parts of England’s eastern coast, experts said.
Eleanor said her son had been talking about his love of elephants just 10 minutes before the find.
“Basically, we were walking along, and 10 minutes before, my son Charlie was saying how much he loves elephants,” she said.
“I can’t believe you can find something so old that existed 1.8 million years ago and then just rocks up on the beach,” she said.