A family in the Calvert Cliffs area of Mayland had the find of a lifetime when they began excavating their backyard for a new sunroom. What began with a couple of intact vertebrae about a foot and a half into the ground turned into one of the most complete fossils of a 15-million year old snaggletooth shark.

The Gibson family called Stephen Godfrey, curator of paleontology for the Calvert Marine Museum, on Halloween night to report their find. Because of the rarity of such a find, Godfrey had his doubts.

“Sharks’ skulls are made mostly of cartilage, not bone, so they almost never withstand the ravages of time. Yet somehow, the shark that came to rest in the Gibsons’ back yard sank belly-up when it died during the Miocene Epoch. It became buried in sand, then by sediment eroding from the Appalachian Mountains. And its skull cavity — containing hundreds of the distinctively shaped teeth, up to an inch-and-a-half long, that give the snaggletooth its name — kept its shape.”

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