YouTuber discovers 12-million-year-old shark tooth hidden in a cliff

An amateur palaeontologist discovered a 12-million-year-old shark tooth hiding in a cliff in New Zealand.

An amateur palaeontologist discovered a 12-million-year-old shark tooth hiding in a cliff in New Zealand.

YouTuber Mamlambo Fossils filmed as he came across the small tooth he suspects to be 12-million-years-old.

He told Newsflare: "I was inspecting a section ancient seafloor that used to be around 300m deep in the mid-Miocene (~12 million years old) when I spotted something interesting sticking out of the cliff.

"I suspected it could be a tooth and wanted to remove it so I could take it to our local museum.

Before starting to work on it, I coated it in some paraloid B72 to consolidate it as fossils this old can have invisible cracks in them causing them to fall apart when you touch them.

"I carefully chipped around it and then lifted it out without touching the fossil itself.

I GPS tagged the exact location it was found as this will be useful to build up a picture of the area over the years as more fossils are found.

"Back home, I used plain old tap water and a toothpick to remove the siltstone from the fossil revealing an extremely sharp and rare shark tooth from a species of catshark - Megascyliorhinus cooperi.

"I used my microscope at 6x magnification to take some close-up photos of it with the scale in mm next to it."