Giant tooth found on SC beach fuels speculation: What kind of creature lost it?

Missy Tracewell has a keen eye for shark teeth and has plucked hundreds out of the sand at South Carolina beaches with her husband -- but never anything like the monster tooth she found during a recent trip to Hunting Island.

“It’s beautiful,” she told McClatchy News, and it dwarfs all her prior finds, the largest of which are no bigger than a quarter.

This tooth is bigger than her palm, hefty like a stone, darkened and dulled with age. It’s fueling speculation over just what kind of beast it belonged to, back when it was pearly white and razor-sharp.

“I would hate to meet face-to-face the mouth that it came out of,” one person commented on a photo of the tooth Tracewell shared to Facebook.

“That looks like a Megalodon tooth!” a commenter wrote, one of several to suggest it came from the extinct, prehistoric shark species. Able to grow up to nearly 60 feet in length -- three times the size of the longest-known great white -- megalodons were one of the “largest predators to have ever lived,” until they died out 3.6 million years ago, according to the Natural History Museum.

“What an awesome find,” another commenter said. “Go buy a lotto ticket!”

“OMG! This is every shark tooth hunter’s DREAM!!” a fellow tooth hunter wrote.

Tracewell hasn’t shared her find with an expert for confirmation, but she’s confident it’s a megalodon tooth, and has been from the second she spotted it, mostly buried, in a water-filled hole just yards from the shoreline.

Her husband had been “playing” around in the hole, she said, and the two were about to pack it in after a mediocre day on the hunt. He missed it, but when she went over to collect him, the tooth caught her eye, its top sticking out near his feet.

“I pick it up, and I stand up, and I’m so shocked that I have it in my hand ... that I dropped it on the sand,” she said.

“I’m screaming, and I’m just like a 5-year-old, jumping up and down and I was crying, ‘I cannot believe this. Oh my God I just found a megalodon tooth.’”

Megalodon teeth are periodically uncovered in South Carolina, and not always deep down or as hidden away as some might imagine.

Earlier this year, a South Carolina woman found a one-pound megalodon tooth in a riverbank near Charleston, McClatchy News reported.

Historically, much of the land that is now South Carolina was a hotbed of shark activity.

A 30-million-year-old megatoothed shark nursery was recently discovered near modern day Summerville, McClatchy News previously reported. The site was littered with the teeth of ancient and extinct shark species and is believed to have served as a place of relative safety for young sharks to grow and develop into adulthood.

The largest megalodon tooth ever found in the state was 6.5 inches long, McClatchy reported.