A dinosaur-loving Red Deer area boy found a 60-million-year-old fossilized shark tooth right in his front yard.
Max Maurizio, 7, was exploring gravel near his home on an acreage southeast of Red Deer Monday when he saw something unlike other rocks. It was sharp at one end and about an inch and a half long.
“He ran into the house saying, ‘I found a tooth!’ I found a tooth!” recalled her mother, Carly Maurizio.
At first, Max’s parents assumed it was from one of their cats. But Carly scrutinized it and decided, “‘it looks pretty old . . .”
Intrigued by Max’s discovery, his father, Claudio Maurizio, emailed a photo of the tooth to the famous Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller.
On Tuesday, an email response came from the museum. He had given the photo to Dr. Don Brinkman, an expert on fossil fish and turtles.
Brinkman believes the fossilized tooth likely belonged to the genus Scapanorhynchus, an ancient extinct type of shark with an elongated snout whose closest living relative is the goblin shark.
“This is an interesting finding,” Brinkman said in the email.
Scapanorhynchus reached a length of about three meters and was an entirely marine animal, “so it is somewhat unusual to get it in the Red Deer area. However, I have seen a tooth of this genus from the 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 grasslands were covered by a warm inland sea. Scientists believe that this Western Interior Seaway stretched 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 variety of life, including sharks, bony fish, marine reptiles, birds, snails, ammonites, and other molluscs.
The Maurizio family appreciates the information the museum has provided about the tooth.
Max is especially excited about his find and wants to become a paleontologist one day, 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 that he would find a bone, and sure enough, he discovered a small piece of wild animal bone, he remembered his father
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 regular little hikes or walks, Max is always looking at the ground, looking for fossils… It’s quite remarkable that they can be found literally anywhere, even in your own garden,” she added.
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Red Deer County
Seven-year-old Max Maurizio shows off the ancient shark tooth he found this week in the gravel on his family’s acreage southeast of Red Deer. (Photo by Lana Michelin/Advocate staff)