- Satish Gaire
When French border agents cracked open a few random packages along a busy highway near the Italian border.
They were probably expecting the usual suspects—drugs, counterfeit goods, maybe some sketchy cigars.
What they got instead? Teeth. Massive, prehistoric teeth.
“We thought we’d find weed. We found plesiosaurs,” joked customs official Samantha Verduron.
On January 27, officers in the town of Menton discovered nine colossal fossilized teeth hidden in parcels bound for Genoa and Milan.
Fossil Teeth from Prehistoric Sea Giants
The ancient chompers were traced back to Morocco and are estimated to be tens of millions of years old.
Curious about what kind of jaws these teeth once filled?
Picture a long-necked marine reptile, zarafasaura oceanis, a plesiosaurus cousin first unearthed in Morocco.
Three other teeth belonged to a mosasaurs, the ocean’s version of a T-Rex, while the remaining five were from a dinosaur, an ancestor of today’s crocodiles.