Max Maurizio, 7, was exploring gravel near his home on an acreage southeast of Red Deer Monday when he spotted something unlike any other rock. 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!” remembered his mom, Carly Maurizio. At first, Max’s parents assumed it came from one of their cats. But Carly examined it carefully and decided, “It looks pretty old…” Intrigued by Max’s discovery, his father, Claudio Maurizio, emailed a photo of the tooth to the world-renowned Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller. On Tuesday, an email response arrived from the museum. The photo was given to Dr. Don Brinkman, an expert on fossil fish and turtles. Brinkman believes the fossilized tooth probably belonged to the genus Scapanorhynchus – a type of extinct ancient long-snouted shark whose closest living relative is the goblin shark. “This is an interesting finding,” Brinkman said in the email. Scapanorhynchus reached about three meters in length and was a fully marine animal, “so it’s a little unusual to get it in the Red Deer area. However, I have seen a tooth of this genus from 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 Meadows 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 range of life, including sharks, bony fish, marine reptiles, birds, snails, ammonites and other molluscs. The Maurizio family appreciates the information the museum provided about the tooth. Max is especially excited about his find and wants to be a paleontologist someday, 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 he would find a bone — and sure enough he did, a small piece of wild animal bone, his father recalled. Since Max has always been fascinated by dinosaurs, the entire 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 short hikes or regular walks, Max is always looking down at the ground, looking for fossils… It’s remarkable that they can be found literally anywhere, even in your backyard,” she added. [email protected] Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter Red Deer County Max Maurizio, seven, shows off the ancient shark’s tooth he found this week in gravel on his family’s acreage southeast of Red Deer. (Staff photo by Lana Michelin/Advocate)
