A golden necklace made from the tooth of a megalodon shark has been uncovered in the wreckage of the Titanic.
Guernsey-based firm Magellan Ltd captured footage of the unique piece of jewellery when carrying out the first digital scans of the shipwreck last summer.
The largest underwater scanning project in history used two submarines to produce 700,000 images of the ship that sank in April 1912.
The megalodon shark necklace was found among other golden bits and bobs that are yet to be identified.
Richard Parkinson, CEO of Magellan, described it as an “astonishing, beautiful and breathtaking” discovery.
He told ITV News: “We found a megalodon tooth which is fashioned into a necklace – it’s incredible, it’s absolutely incredible.
“What is not widely understood is that the Titanic is in two parts and there’s a three-square-mile debris field between the bow and the stern.
“The team mapped the field in such detail that we could pick out those details.”
The megalodon is an extinct species of shark that roamed the planet’s oceans between 23million and 3.6million years ago.
The beast is a close relative of the great white shark, with estimates suggesting they grew to be almost 70ft-long.
Some experts however have expressed doubts that the tooth on the necklace did belong to one.
Catalina Pimiento, a palaeontologist at Swansea University who specialises in sharks, told MailOnline it’s hard to know for sure without a sense of scale of the other objects in the photograph.
She said: “The tooth seems to have a ‘neck’, which is the darker area between the tooth crown and the root.
“But because the picture is so low quality, it is hard to see if this is the case.”
Magellan Ltd are unable to touch the necklace as there is an agreement between the UK and the US preventing members of the public removing artefacts from the Titanic’s wreck.
