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“This is an amazing find and is interesting in several aspects,” said
The tooth is coated in parts with a crust of manganese, a chemical element that’s known to develop around fossil nuclei.
“90 percent of the world’s exploration contracts for nodules are in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which represent less than half of 1 percent of the global seafloor,” The Metals Company PR and Media Manager
“But this represents the largest source of manganese, nickel, and cobalt, anywhere on the planet and that dwarfs everything on land by many orders of magnitude. There are enough metals in situ at two of the sites that would satisfy the needs of 280 million cars, which represents every car in America, or a quarter of the world’s vehicle fleet.”
However, like all explorative ideas, it’s
The fierce tooth has sat on the seabed for at least 3.5 million years, write the researchers, and in that time may have served as food for a peculiar group of worms. The annelid (segmented worm) Osedax packardorum is known to bore into teeth to feed on dentin pulp, and it’s possible the giant teeth of megalodon could’ve served as a hearty meal.
From one marine predator’s mouth to the seabed and a 3.5-million-year wait to be scooped up by a robot, this tooth sure has some stories to tell. Finding fossils in the deep sea might not be easy, but the researchers say it shows that it’s worth looking if we’re going to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of these poorly preserved animals.
“This fossil provides us with important insights into the distribution of megalodon,” said Jürgen Pollerspöck, researcher at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Germany and co-author of the study. “The sample indicates that megalodon was not a purely coastal species and that this species migrated across ocean basins similar to many modern-day species such as the great white shark.”
The study is published in the journal
An earlier version of this article was published in