Unexpected Discovery: A 2-Kilogram “Tooth” Found on the Beach + Photo

According to Saed News Agency, citing Farid, Chris Bian visited Holland-on-Sea in Essex, England on his birthday. He and his wife were walking along the beach when Chris stopped to sit on a rock near the water. Looking down, he noticed a wavy linear pattern in the sand.

The 56-year-old Chris says: “I saw something sticking out and thought, given its shape, it must be a tooth. I started brushing the sand away with my hands, but it was buried too deep to pull out by hand. Mark and I had brought a small garden shovel with us, and we used it to dig it out. It was completely fossilized.”

“I couldn’t believe it. As we were digging it out, I hoped it would be a mammoth tooth, but I kept telling my husband it couldn’t be! Earlier that same day I had said I wanted to find a mammoth tooth, and I never imagined that just hours later we would be holding one and laughing in disbelief.”

The find is likely a tooth root fragment, measuring about 6.5 to 7 inches in depth and width, and weighing over 4 pounds (around 2 kilograms).

After consulting online sources, Chris believes the tooth may belong to a steppe mammoth, one of the largest mammoth species. These were ancestors of the woolly mammoth and lived around 1.8 million years ago. Another possibility is that the fossil is only half of a mammoth tooth, since only about two inches are used for chewing while the rest is root structure, meaning the remaining portion may be missing.

Chris plans to keep the tooth and is currently soaking it in distilled water for several weeks. After drying, it will be preserved with a protective coating of adhesive and ethanol.

Chris volunteers at his local museum in Worthing and has been a member of the Brighton and Hove Archaeological Society for 17 years.

The beaches of northern Essex are known for their abundance of fossil finds. Chris’s other discoveries include mammoth leg and toe bones, as well as Ice Age horse teeth and ankle bones.