Anna Paskins, 23, was strolling along the seafront with her fiancé Toby Hadley and five-month-old baby Emily on Friday, May 15 and were searching for sea glass when they discovered the tooth in the sand.
The discovery happened around one year after Anna and her partner were engaged in the same area.
Baby Emily with the shark tooth fossil. (Image: Anna Haskins)
Anna said: “We were near the Sea Life centre, and we were looking for glass for a home project. We rummaged around in the sand before we found this shark tooth. We were looking at the tooth and wondering how old it could be.
“I thought it was cool. I didn’t know you can find fossils in Southend. It’s not a Jurassic coast so it’s quite unusual to discover something like this. My daughter is too young to understand, but my partner was surprised.
“I asked Chat GPT about the tooth and it gave me an idea of how old it is. It said the fossil is possibly 55 million years old and might have belonged to a Tiger shark. It was just a family day out on the seafront, and we ended up finding a shark tooth.”
Anna Paskins got engaged to Toby Hadley on the Southend seafront last year. (Image: Anna Paskins)
Anna, who grew up in Southend and lived near the ocean as a child, sent pictures to her family after finding the shark tooth who were shocked at the revelation.
“Everyone was quite excited about it,” she added.
“It’s about the length of one pound coin but not as wide. It’s not huge. When I was kid, I loved looking for seashells and stuff like that. I loved fossil finding. I want my daughter to grow up around nature and explore and experience what I had as a child.
The family were shocked to find the tooth. (Image: Anna Paskins)
“I was always by the sea, and my grandad had a boat when I was a kid, so I loved being near the water.”
The earliest fossil evidence for sharks or their ancestors are a few scales dating to 450 million years ago, during the Late Ordovician Period, according to the Natural History Museum.
