Man Stunned at What ‘Small White Object’ Found in Bag of Gravel Really Is

A father of two made a wild discovery while working on a landscaping project with a neighbor at his Washington home.

“Last summer, I purchased a couple of bags of Vigoro red lava rock from my local Home Depot in Burlington for a landscaping project,” Steven Phillipe told Newsweek. “This weekend, while spreading the gravel in my neighbor’s yard, I stumbled upon something I didn’t expect to find.”

Phillipe, 38, from Bellingham, was working alongside his neighbor, with his 8-year-old son Bodhi nearby, when he noticed a “small white object” in the gravel and pointed it out to them both, asking, “What is that?”

“I bent down to take a closer look, and to my shock, I realized it was a shark tooth,” Phillipe said. “At first, my neighbor thought I was pulling a prank on him, but there it was in my hand—no joke.”

Phillipe knew the tooth couldn’t possibly belong to any local wild animal. “We have deer and bobcats in the area so sometimes you might find something, but this was a large flat serrated tooth,” he said.

However, after further research online, he learned the truth: it wasn’t just any old shark’s tooth but an upper tooth that would have once belonged to a great white shark.

Phillipe posted a picture of his discovery to Reddit, under the handle u/Emotional-Corner7337, where users concurred he had found a great white tooth.

“Curious about where the rocks might have come from, I discovered that they were likely sourced from quarries in New Mexico, California, or Utah,” he said.

“While it’s not unheard of for people to find small fossils or even shark teeth in gravel from Home Depot, finding a tooth from such a legendary predator is an extraordinary find and in one piece!”

Newsweek reached out to Home Depot for comment.

This isn’t the first time home improvement has led to an extraordinary discovery. One homeowner previously hit the headlines after discovering a fossilized human jawbone in one of the tiles in his parents’ new bathroom.

Phillipe’s shark tooth discovery is a source of pride for his family.

“It’s been a fun conversation piece. It’s not every day you find a piece of a monster of a beast in the pacific northwest,” he said, confirming that both Bodhi and his daughter Ayla, 6, took the tooth into class recently for “show and tell.”

“Our long-term plan is to keep it and maybe make it into a necklace for my son,” he said. “We currently put it in our mini museum where, as a family, we keep special items and things from our lives and places we travel. We have items like my kiddos first lost tooth to items like sand from the beach of Normandy and turtle shells collected from our honeymoon in Tulum.”