A fisherman discovers a 5.5-inch ancient shark tooth while pulling oysters from Maryland's Chesapeake Bay

• A Maryland fisherman found an ancient megalodon tooth in the Chesapeake Bay.
• Stephen Rollins told McClatchy News that the tooth "just plopped down on top of the pile of oysters."

A fisherman in Maryland found an ancient megalodon tooth the size of his hand while fishing for oysters in the Chesapeake Bay, according to reports.

"We dumped the load and it just plopped down on top of the pile of oysters," Stephen Rollins told McClatchy News on Monday. "I couldn't believe it!"

Bambi Rollins, Stephen's wife, in a February 12 Facebook post said her husband and his first mate, Jeremiah Jordan, found the tooth in a pile of oysters that they pulled in from the Chesapeake Bay days earlier.

"I was stunned! It took me a second to register what I was actually looking at," Stephen Rollins told McClatchy. "I picked it up and said, 'thank you, Jesus!' It really is a timepiece."

Babmi Rollins told McClatchy that the tooth measured exactly 5.5 inches by 3.5 inches. According to the outlet, Rollins and Jordan found the tooth "a mile or so south of the mouth of the Patuxent River" while dredging in 20-foot water.

Rollins said she took the tooth to Maryland's Calvert Marine Museum for researchers to analyze it, where workers told her the tooth could be as old as 8 million years and likely came from the side of a shark's jaw, McClatchy reported.

"This isn't the biggest tooth in this shark's mouth as they get bigger toward the front of the mouth," Bambi Rollins said.

Megalodons were massive sharks that lived around 23 million to 3.6 million years ago, Insider previously reported. Because shark skeletons are mostly cartilage, researchers don't have much physical evidence for their size, and estimations for how large they may have been are varied.

A study published in 2021 by Paleontologia Electronica used the widths of the megalodon's teeth to determine the length of its jaw, showing that megalodons are estimated to have been around 60 to 65 feet long, four times the size of an average great white shark.