{"id":899355,"date":"2026-06-28T21:18:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T21:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/899355\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T21:18:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T21:18:18","slug":"11-year-old-uk-boy-finds-1-8m-year-old-elephant-tooth-on-beach-in-wild-coincidence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/899355\/","title":{"rendered":"11-year-old UK boy finds 1.8M-year-old elephant tooth on beach in wild coincidence"},"content":{"rendered":"

An 11-year-old English boy<\/a> recently stumbled onto a 1.8 million-year-old fist-sized tooth from a now-extinct elephant while walking on the beach with his family.<\/p>\n

The eagle-eyed kid, Charlie Orchard-Lisle, spotted the rock-like object along the shoreline of East Lane beach in Bawdsey, a quaint coastal village in Suffolk, England<\/a>, in May \u2014 just as he was talking about his love of elephants, according to local UK outlet South West News Service.<\/p>\n

Charlie Orchard-Lisle, 11, holds the 1.8 million-year-old elephant tooth he recently found while walking on a beach in England. Newsquest \/ SWNS<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were walking along and could see this thing by the lapping waves,\u201d the boy\u2019s mother, Eleanor, told the outlet.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt must have been quite distinctive because it caught both our eyes \u2014 we could tell it was something different, it had a different feel to it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

What they found was an upper left molar belonging to an Anancus avernensis \u2014 a now-extinct relative of the African bush elephant that walked the earth nearly 2 million years ago, according to paleontology Professor Adrian Lister<\/a> at the Natural History Museum in London<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The boy\u2019s mom said she and her son could immediately \u201ctell it was something different.\u201d Newsquest \/ SWNS<\/p>\n

Tthe African bush elephant is a relative of the now-extinct Anancus avernensis, which the tooth belonged to. Jurgens \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n

The tooth is 4 inches wide, with its enamel preserved and mineralized over hundreds of thousands of years, the outlet reported.<\/p>\n

Erosion likely freed the tooth from the area\u2019s fossil-rich Red Crag cliffs, a geological formation running along parts of England\u2019s eastern coast, experts said.<\/p>\n

Eleanor said her son had been talking about his love of elephants just 10 minutes before the find.<\/p>\n

\u201cBasically, we were walking along, and 10 minutes before, my son Charlie was saying how much he loves elephants,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t believe you can find something so old that existed 1.8 million years ago and then just rocks up on the beach,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An 11-year-old English boy recently stumbled onto a 1.8 million-year-old fist-sized tooth from a now-extinct elephant while walking…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":899356,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[27],"tags":[25052,2846,45951,159,90885,67,132,68,837,107],"class_list":["post-899355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-dinosaurs","tag-discovery","tag-fossils","tag-science","tag-teeth","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-wildlife","tag-world-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116829821607845050","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/899356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}