A teenage boy has found a shark tooth belonging to a prehistoric creature on the Essex coast after going on a weekend away.

Ben found the 10cm-long (four-inch) tooth at Walton-on-the-Naze during a summer holiday weekend break with his dad, Jason.

Jason said his son was “over the moon” with the find adding that he knew “it was something” from the moment they spotted it.

Essex Wildlife Trust has confirmed it was a megalodon tooth, adding it was a “rare find” with it still being intact.

Jason and his son were on a weekend break from their home in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, to go searching for fossils.

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They arrived at their destination on Friday evening and by Sunday morning had managed to clock up 16 miles of walking along the coast.

They woke up at the crack of dawn on Sunday to get down to the beach before anyone else when Ben spotted the giant tooth under the rocks at around 7am.

Jason, 50, said: “We could just see the edge of it, sticking out, and Ben knew straightaway it was something and pulled it out of the sand.”

The pair took their find to Essex Wildlife Trust’s Discovery Centre at Walton-on-the-Naze where they were told it was a megalodon tooth.

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Jason said he and his son go to Walton-on-the-Naze to go fossil hunting once a year and also to the Jurassic Coast, a 95-mile (153km) long stretch of coastline in southern England.

He said Ben wants to be a palaeontologist when he is older and the giant tooth was a “great addition” to his collection.

Essex Wildlife Trust said the tooth would be from 20 million years old to 3.6 million.

It said several had been found at The Naze but more commonly they were fragments of the teeth.

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