Young Fossil Hunter Found a Bit of Wood, Examination Revealed It to Be a 700,000-Year-Old Bear Tooth

Around three years ago, a nine-year-old girl's field trip in England gave her one of the biggest surprises in the form of a 700,000-year-old bear tooth. Etta discovered the tooth on a beach of West Runton in Norfolk, stated BBC. A fossil aficionado, the girl did not think much of the item initially. "I was looking down and there it was," she said. "I thought it was a fossilized bit of wood so I put it in my pocket, and when we got back to the car park we showed it to a fossil expert and she fell off her chair."

Etta remembered that the fossil expert called her fortunate for recovering the 9cm long (3in) tooth. "She said, 'People search for 20 years and don't find anything this good' and told us it was a bear tooth," Etta reminisced. Later she loaned the tooth to Norfolk Museums Service geologist, David Waterhouse, for further analysis. He was ecstatic about getting the chance to examine the tooth, as they are hard to come by in the region. "To find a perfect massive bear canine is a first for me in 16 years working here," he explained. "We normally find lots of deer fossils, for example, but as you go up the food chain, you find fewer and fewer carnivores like the bear." Examinations unveiled that the tooth belonged to an ancestor of the common brown bear.

Experts think such findings have become more common because of extreme weather conditions. Such conditions are speeding up phenomena like coastal erosion. According to Waterhouse, the whole situation is "a double-edged sword - people's homes and livelihoods are at risk, but it also means that amazing finds such as the Happisburgh footprints are being discovered." Waterhouse appreciated fossil hunters like Etta who explored sites, without exploiting the surroundings. He further stated that fossil hunters who do not dig into cliffs, report their finds responsibly to authorities, and take note of when and where they made their discoveries are of huge help to archaeologists. 

Etta was happy to have contributed to the research. She and her sister became interested in fossils after attending a Norfolk Wildlife Trust fossil hunting course, according to their mother Thea Ferner. The discovery has encouraged Etta to continue her pursuit of fossils. "The family joke is there's a whole bear out there waiting to be found," the mother added. Etta in her own words, after finding the bear's fossil had another animal in sight- a giant beaver - "a tooth of a giant beaver, that would be good".

This was not the first time Norfolk produced a stunning archaeological find. Researchers uncovered what they believed to be the oldest archaeological site in northern Europe on Norfolk's Deep History Coast in Happisburgh. In 2013, experts found  800,000-year-old human footprints from the site. "More human footprints have been found at Happisburgh in 2019 and at West Runton in 2017 a rhino was found, more hand axes and stone tools are turning up," Waterhouse said.