Alabama Museum of Natural History Director Dr. John Friel recently found an unusual surprise in the waters of Aliceville’s Shark Tooth Creek.
The discovery has been identified as “a very rare, 84 million-year-old hadrosaur dinosaur tooth,” according to a Facebook post from the museum.
And while Shark Tooth Creek is known for its fossilized bounty, this particular find gave Friel and paleontologists on site pause.
The tooth is believed to have belonged to a hadrosaur, a group of duck-billed dinosaurs that lived on land in the Cretaceous Period.
Hadrosaurs were quick, herbivorous creatures that could reach up to 50 feet in length, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology.
Although the species had hundreds of teeth, finding one in Alabama is rare because the area lacks surface deposits from being covered by the sea for millions of years, according to Friel.
“Dinosaur fossils are very uncommon in Alabama since there are no surface deposits of Jurassic age,” Friel told the Miami Herald.
“All of the dinosaur fossils discovered in Alabama are thought to be of dinosaurs that died and were then washed out to sea where they were likely scavenged by sharks or other marine creatures before they were fossilized.”
The tooth was added to the museum’s research collection and could be included in a future exhibit, he told the publication.
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