A dinosaur-loving Red Deer boy found a 60-million-year-old fossilized shark tooth — right in his own backyard.
Max Maurizio, 7, was exploring gravel near his home on an acreage southeast of Red Deer Monday when he noticed something that didn’t look like the other rocks. It was sharp at one end and about an inch and a half long.
“He rushed into the house and said, ‘I found a tooth!’ I found a tooth!” his mother Carly Maurizio recalls.
At first, Max’s parents assumed it came from one of their cats. But Carly examined it carefully and decided, “it looks pretty old…”
Intrigued by Max’s discovery, his father, Claudio Maurizio, emailed a photo of the tooth to the world-renowned Tyrell Paleontology Museum in Drumheller.
An email response from the museum arrived on Tuesday. The photo was submitted to Dr. Don Brinkman, an expert on fossil fish and turtles.
Brinkman concluded that the fossilized tooth likely belonged to the genus Scapanorhynchus, an extinct species of ancient long-snouted shark whose closest living relative is the goblin shark.
“This is an interesting finding,” Brinkman said in the email.
Scapanorhynchus reaches a length of about three meters and is completely marine, “so it’s a bit unusual to find it in the Red Deer area. However, I have seen a tooth of this genus from exposures of the Horseshoe Canyon Formation in the Tolman Bridge area,” east of Trochu, Brinkman wrote.
He noted that the rocks around Red Deer are from the Paskapoo Formation and are about 60 million years old.
From 100 million to 66 million years ago, the prairies were covered by a warm inland sea. Scientists believe that this Western Interior Seaway, stretching 3,000 km from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, was 1,000 km wide and 700 meters deep.
The ancient body of water contained a wide range of life, including sharks, bony fish, marine reptiles, birds, snails, ammonites and other molluscs.
The Maurizio family appreciates the information provided by the museum about the tooth.
Max is especially excited about his find and wants to become a paleontologist someday, Carly said.
Claudio noted that his son always notices things that other people don’t. Once, before going on a nature walk with his grandfather in Ontario, Max predicted he would find a bone — and he did find a small piece of bone from a wild animal, his father recalled.
Because Max has always been fascinated by dinosaurs, the whole family, including younger brother Meyer, regularly camps at Drumheller and visits the museum at least once a year, Carly said.
“Even when we go on little hikes or regular walks, Max is always looking down at the ground looking for fossils… It’s remarkable that they can be found literally anywhere, even in your own backyard,” she added.
lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter
Red Deer County
Here’s a close-up of the ancient shark tooth Max Maurizio, seven years old, found in his backyard in Red Deer County. (Photo attached).
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