That thing that looks like a football in museum curator Erich Fitzgerald’s hands is actually a five-million-year-old tooth. Fossil hunter Murray Orr found the mighty chomper back in February. The 30cm-long (12 inch) chomper was found by fossil enthusiast Murray Orr, who happened upon it in February while walking on a beach at Beaumaris Bay near Melbourne, Australia.

“I first thought it might be a discarded can.” Orr said.  “But when I got closer and saw how it was coming out [of the sandy beach] I thought it might be an anti-aircraft shell.  I thought ‘here we go, I’m going to blow my arm off’…but then I noticed the curve and thought it looked like a whale tooth.”  

Orr recently donated the tooth to Museum Victoria, where it will aid in research and was unveiled to the public and put on display last Thursday. Orr figured the tooth must’ve belonged to an extinct species of “killer sperm whale.”  He was right but it also is the biggest tooth ever discovered on the continent. The extinct giant it once belonged to is believed to have weighed nearly 45 tons and measured 60 feet in length. The tooth itself is just less than a foot long, and weighs 6 pounds.

The tooth belongs to a type of killer sperm whale that ate other, smaller whales and was previously thought to only exist in the Americas, according to the Australian Broadcast Corporation. It’s larger than the tooth of a Tyrannosaurus rex and is about 5 million years old.

The finding also undermines existing theories which believe that the giant sperm whales lived only in the Western Hemisphere. “Until this find at Beaumaris all fossils of giant killer sperm whales were found on the west coast of South and North America,” Erich Fitzgerald, a paleontologist, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. Breaking News at Newsmax.com.

The find not only suggests that the extinct species wasn’t limited to North and South America, but also that it survived much longer than previously believed.

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