An 11-year-old boy in England found an 1.8 million-year-old fossil on the beach. This is the tooth of an extinct elephant species ‘Anancus avernensis’, which has been confirmed by experts. This discovery took place on a beach in Suffolk.
An 11 year old boy in England has found something that even big experts are surprised by. The boy, named Charlie Orchard-Lisle, was walking with his family on East Lane Beach in Bodsey, Suffolk in May. Then his eyes fell on a huge tusk, which was actually the fossil of an extinct elephant about 18 lakh years old.
According to the New York Post, Charlie’s mother Eleanor said, “We were walking on the beach and then we saw this thing near the waves.” He further said, “It was quite different in appearance, so both of us paid attention to it. We understood that it was not an ordinary stone, it had a different feel to it.”
Later, when experts examined it, it was found that this fossil was the upper left molar tooth of an ancient elephant named ‘Anancus avernensis’. This species was a distant relative of today’s African elephants, which became extinct about two million years ago. According to Professor Adrian Lister, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, this tooth is about four inches wide and its upper layer (enamel) is still safe, which has become stone-like due to minerals over millions of years.
Researchers believe that this ancient tooth may have come out of the ‘Red Craig’ rocks of Suffolk. These rocks are known to preserve prehistoric fossils inside them and due to sea erosion such things often come out. Eleanor also told an interesting thing, which made this discovery even more special. “We were just out walking and just 10 minutes before we found this, my son Charlie was saying how much he loved elephants,” he said.
On this unique experience, he said, “I cannot believe that something 18 lakh years old, which was once present on earth, can be found on the beach just like that.”