In the early morning of 15 April 1912, the largest ocean liner in service at the time, Titanic, sank. The catastrophe led to several expeditions, and nearly in a 2000 expedition by RMS Titanic Inc., over 800 artifacts were recovered. The latest development is a necklace made from the tooth of a megalodon shark with gold in it. The trinket was revealed in new images by Guernsey-based firm Magellan Ltd. The glittering piece of jewelry has been found in the wreckage of the Titanic in a crystal clear digital scan of the sunken ship, owing to the largest underwater scanning project in history.
The company took over a thousand photos of the site but could not retrieve the piece as an agreement between the UK and the US prevents anyone from extracting artifacts from the wreckage and surrounding bed. Richard Parkinson, CEO of Magellan, shared, “What is not widely understood is that the Titanic is in two parts, and there’s a three-square-mile debris field between the bow and the stern. The team mapped the field in such detail that we could pick out those details.”
Titanic researcher, Mandy Le Boutillier, complimented the image quality stating, “It is chilling when you see objects like a pair of shoes because there was once a body there. It makes you think, everybody talks about how the Titanic was a wonderful ship of dreams, but ultimately it’s a grave.” The submersibles took a whopping 700,000 images of every angle of the ship for over 200 hours last summer to create a perfect 3D reconstruction. As far as the shark tooth is concerned, the tooth of a megalodon, in particular, is known as Otodus megalodon, a prehistoric shark that lived more than 23 million years ago.
Michael Benton, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Bristol, said, “Megalodon teeth cover your hand,’ he told MailOnline. ‘Whether it’s a great white or other modern shark probably can’t be said for sure.” RMS Titanic may have sunk a century ago, but it stays alive through new discoveries or auctions of old finds. Last year, the pocket watch of Titanic’s postal clerk sold at auction for $116,000.
