4:22:16 
2023-02-08 
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It took nearly a decade, but Molly Sampson found what she had been searching for her whole life.
It happened Christmas morning when the 9-year-old girl was out searching for shark teeth with family in Calvert Beach, Maryland.
It was there Molly waded into the cold waters of the Chesapeake Bay and pulled out the once-in-a-lifetime find: a 5-inch-long megalodon tooth.
"She was over-the-moon excited," Molly's mother, Alicia Sampson, told USA TODAY on Wednesday. "It was something she dreamt about finding. She's been shark tooth hunting since age 1 when she would crawl along the beach."
A homeschooled student from Prince Frederick, Molly has collected more than 400 shark teeth since before she could walk. But the discovery marked the fourth grader's biggest find yet.
Stephen Godfrey, curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum, where the girl took her find, confirmed that the tooth belonged to the extinct shark megalodon (Otodus megalodon), which disappeared millions of years ago.
The meg is believed to be one of the largest predators that ever lived until its extinction, and scientists believe it could have grown 50 to 60 feet long. For a long time, scientists believed the megalodon's closest relative was the great white shark, but research shows it is most closely related to the mako shark, according to the Smithsonian.
Because of its large teeth, experts believe it feasted on whales, large fish and probably other sharks. From the size of the tooth, Godfrey said, it would have come from a fish 45 to 50 feet long. He also said that based on where the tooth was found and the age of the sediments from which it most likely originated, the tooth probably about 15 million years old.
As she hunted for oyster mushrooms in the woods near her home Wednesday morning during a school field trip with her mother and sister, Molly explained she wasn't the first in her family to find a massive shark tooth.
Her father, who has been fossil hunting in the area along Chesapeake Bay since he was a child, also snagged one a few years back.
But hers was "much bigger."
"His was 3 inches. It's like a baby," Molly said, laughing.
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