<p>Kenshu Shimada of DePaul University in Chicago was searching the drawers for specimens of fish teeth and discovered a "humongous" one, 117 mm wide lungfish which are among human's closest living piscine relatives.<br /><br />James Kirkland, state palaeontologist at the Utah Geological Survey, identified the tooth as coming from the upper jaw of a lungfish in the extinct genus Ceratodus, a freshwater bottom-feeder which used massive tooth plates to crunch shelled animals, the 'New Scientist' reported.<br /><br />Kirkland and Shimada estimate the new Ceratodus was at least 4 metres long, beating the previous record of 3.5 metres for an African fossil. The largest living lungfish come in at almost 2 metres.<br /><br />They suspect the monster lungfish, which dates from between 160 million and 100 million years ago – during the age of dinosaurs – fed on turtles.<br /><br />A resident of central Nebraska named Verne Baldwin found the tooth in 1940 and gave it to the museum. But how it got to be in central Nebraska is a mystery, since the local rock is not from the right geological era.<br /><br />Describing the find at a meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Shimada speculated that the ancient tooth might have been washed downstream to Nebraska by floods, or carried as a ritual object by early humans.</p>
<p>Kenshu Shimada of DePaul University in Chicago was searching the drawers for specimens of fish teeth and discovered a "humongous" one, 117 mm wide lungfish which are among human's closest living piscine relatives.<br /><br />James Kirkland, state palaeontologist at the Utah Geological Survey, identified the tooth as coming from the upper jaw of a lungfish in the extinct genus Ceratodus, a freshwater bottom-feeder which used massive tooth plates to crunch shelled animals, the 'New Scientist' reported.<br /><br />Kirkland and Shimada estimate the new Ceratodus was at least 4 metres long, beating the previous record of 3.5 metres for an African fossil. The largest living lungfish come in at almost 2 metres.<br /><br />They suspect the monster lungfish, which dates from between 160 million and 100 million years ago – during the age of dinosaurs – fed on turtles.<br /><br />A resident of central Nebraska named Verne Baldwin found the tooth in 1940 and gave it to the museum. But how it got to be in central Nebraska is a mystery, since the local rock is not from the right geological era.<br /><br />Describing the find at a meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Shimada speculated that the ancient tooth might have been washed downstream to Nebraska by floods, or carried as a ritual object by early humans.</p>