An 11-year-old boy in England recently made an unusual beach day discovery: an ancient elephant tooth from a species that lived about 1.8 million years ago.
Charlie Orchard-Lisle found the tooth at East Lane beach in Bawdsey, a coastal village near Ipswich, Suffolk, in May, news agency SWNS reported.
Found near the shoreline, the specimen was later identified as an upper left molar measuring about 4 inches wide.
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It once belonged to Anancus arvernensis, an extinct relative of modern elephants, including today's African bush elephant.
Photos of the strange, rock-like object show that the tooth's enamel has been preserved and mineralized over millions of years.
According to Charlie's mother, Eleanor Orchard-Lisle, the timing of the discovery was particularly striking.
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"Basically, we were walking along, and 10 minutes before, my son Charlie was saying how much he loves elephants," said Eleanor, according to SWNS.
"We were walking along and could see this thing by the lapping waves. So it must have been quite distinctive, because it caught both our eyes. So we picked it up, and my husband came over."
The mother said the family immediately recognized the object "was something different."
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"It had a different feel to it," she said.
The family isn't sure where the tooth came from, but Eleanor Orchard-Lisle suggested that it had been buried within a Red Crag cliff, a fossil-rich geological formation found along parts of England's eastern coast.
The tooth may have then been flushed out by erosion before appearing on the beach.
"It is quite incredible, and 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," said Eleanor Orchard-Lisle, per the SWNS report.
The Suffolk schoolboy joins a growing list of children who have stumbled upon remarkable ancient finds.
In late April, a group of first-grade students in Norway uncovered a rare Viking-age sword while exploring a field.
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At around the same time, an 8-year-old boy in Israel discovered a 1,700-year-old fragment of a Roman statuette while visiting the Ramon Crater in the Negev Desert.
