A museum director found the ancient item in a gravelly creek
The fossil was identified as belonging to a hadrosaur, a group of massive mammals that lived on land — but the tooth was found in an area that would have been underwater during the age of dinosaurs.
The “very rare, 84 million-year-old hadrosaur dinosaur tooth” was found in Shark Tooth Creek in western Alabama, according to the Alabama Museum of Natural History.
A group with the museum was on a summer trip looking through the local creek when they stumbled across the distinct artifact.
Dr. John Friel, the director of the museum, said he was surprised to find the tooth in a bed of gravel while accompanying the activity.
“I have been doing these trips for the past ten years, but this was the first time I have ever found a dinosaur fossil,” Friel told McClatchy News affiliate Miami Herald.
Friel said when he first picked the tooth up, he thought it might just be an oddly shaped piece of bone.
Shark Tooth Creek, about 50 miles southwest of Tuscaloosa, is a popular spot for visitors to hunt for fossils and oyster shells.
The area is full of fossilized teeth dating back more than 60 million years, when most of Alabama was covered by shallow oceans full of sea creatures.
So it’s not unusual to find a piece of shark tooth or bone on the level that used to be the bottom of the ocean — but then Friel took a closer look.
“However, when I turned it over and saw that it had a shiny enameled surface with a distinctive texture, I was fairly certain it was a tooth,” Friel said.
Friel and two university paleontologists confirmed it appeared to be the base of a hadrosaur tooth, over a half-inch long.
But during the time they were alive, hadrosaurs weren’t anywhere near the area that is now known as Alabama.
The water cuts through rock that “formed roughly 84 million years ago when this part of Alabama was submerged under the sea,” Friel said.
The area was likely entirely underwater at the time the dinosaur would have been alive.
Hadrosaurs were duck-billed, herbivorous dinosaurs that spent most of their time on land, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology.
Source: https://www.the-sun.com/tech/14931661/dinosaur-tooth-found-creek-alabama-fossil/