Girl, nine, finds megalodon shark tooth on Maryland beach

I was younger than her when I found a two-inch specimen in the middle of the street I lived on.

Over 65 years ago in the Tampa bay area it was not very crowded at all. Especially in the summer when all the seasonal residents went back up north. This was when air conditioning was still very uncommon, mostly confined to the supermarkets and banks, many which had large sitting areas where the senior citizens could hang out.

Anyway they were subdividing the undeveloped tracts in town to build homes but the neighborhood was still only about half built. Lots of woods and fields but this was not really a remote suburb, it's part of the city grid about 50 blocks from downtown. But the streets were still white dirt roads back then.

These were actually "shell roads" where the white dirt consisted of crushed fossilized clamshells, basically calcium carbonate.

Turns out it was the cars that did the crushing, too. Every few years a big truck would come and put out a new layer of shells. About half would be intact from half an inch size to 3 or 4 inches all over the place. No more walking barefoot or riding bikes for a while. These were dug up from ancient accumulations along the gulf coast which were probably about like the places where the sea current piles shells up today. But they were pure white after lying undisturbed in their deposits for zillions of years.

When the neighbors came home they would have to drive slowly and carefully, there was even less traction than the dirt road. After a few weeks when it started to get about the consistency of small gravel, this is when the dust was highest. Then another truck would come and drip oil on the roads, no asphalt or tar but more like a dark brown heating oil. Kids who had been safely walking barefoot had gotten accustomed to dusty feet up to their ankles, then it became dirty soles of feet that would not wash right off with a hose. After a month or two the road was white again which is how it was most of the time.

Well one time a couple days after they spread out the big shells, I was carefully tip-toeing across the street in my flip-flops and there it was. Looked like the one in the picture but not as big. The only black thing in the whole street, it was a no-brainer.

It was once in a lifetime for me, everybody was looking for one after that, and nobody I knew ever found another.