South Carolina Couple Spotted A Shape In The Riverbank And Made A Creepy Discovery

Birdsong. The smell of flowers. The trickle of running water. All is calm in South Carolina as a young couple stroll along beside the Stono River. But suddenly the idyllic scene descends into something much darker. They’ve spotted a shape emerging from the sandy bank, and it’s really not the sort of item you find every day. In fact, the thought of it alone is enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

As they ambled along the muddy shores of the river, Jessica Rose-Standafer Owens and her husband Simon kept their eyes on the ground. Because they had an ulterior motive behind their visit to this picturesque spot; they were looking for treasure. And soon their focus was rewarded as they spied something strange half-buried in the riverbank.

When the couple took a closer look, they realized the terrifying truth about their chance discovery. But what horror could they have possibly found so close to South Carolina’s biggest and most famous city? It almost brought Jessica to tears, after all, leaving the pair reeling with emotion and excitement.

It turned out that the mysterious object was millions of years old – a hair-raising relic from another age. And somehow it had found its way to this sleepy riverbank, just waiting for someone to come along and discover it. So what is the story behind the artifact that has caused a sensation around the world?

Well, the haunting relic’s latest chapter revolves around the Owenses. Jessica is a South Carolina native, born in the southern city close to where she made her astonishing find, according to her social media profile. Her husband hails from Asheville, meanwhile, some 250 miles away in North Carolina. At the time of the discovery, though, the couple were apparently living in Charleston.

Jessica describes herself as a scientist on her TikTok account – not usually the sort of person to be easily shocked or misled. So this object must have been somewhat spectacular. But it didn’t come as a total surprise to the Owenses, because they were in the area deliberately looking for this sort of relic.

The couple’s adventure was kicked off by a conversation with Will Adams from the Charleston company Write Off The Rip Charters. Based at Limehouse Landing on the Stono River, the experienced captain knows a thing or two about the city’s waters – and the secrets that they are hiding.

A keen hunter of a strange sort of treasure, Adams tipped Jessica and Simon off as to where they might find their own relics. So they made a trip out of the city to explore the banks of the Stono River. Yet the tide was not on their side, and high water meant that they came home empty-handed.

Undeterred, the Owenses returned to the riverbank for a second attempt in May 2020. And this time they were successful. After just ten minutes of searching, they stumbled across something poking out of the mud. When they took a closer look, they realized that it was exactly what they had been hoping to find.

A tidal creek that runs through South Carolina to the southwest of Charleston, the Stono River might not seem a likely location for discoveries of this kind. Its gently sloping banks, in fact, are more typically home to anglers and hikers than anything else. But perhaps its turbulent history might give us some clue as to what the Owenses found...

Because, after all, the Stono River was the site of a famous rebellion that took place back in 1739. South Carolina at that time was still a British colony, largely populated by slaves shipped over from Africa. But for the people trapped in this nightmare, the Spanish settlement of Florida offered a ray of hope.

Promised freedom if they could make the journey south, the slaves were inspired to revolt. And that September one group set out from the Stono River to march the 200 miles to Florida. Their numbers eventually swelled to around 80, becoming the biggest uprising of its kind before the American Revolution.

Although the slaves of the Stono Rebellion were eventually captured, their brave actions in the face of adversity live on in the memories of many South Carolinians. Could a relic from this period in the state’s history have made it into Jessica and Simon’s hands? Or was their find something else entirely?

Because the Stono Rebellion isn’t the only interesting event to have taken place in this region’s long history. Some 40 years later, in 1779, a battle between British and American forces took place at a spot known as Stono Ferry. The Revolutionary War was already in full swing, and the colonies were locked in a desperate fight for independence.

Before the Battle of Stono Ferry, the British had tried, and failed, to take the nearby city of Charleston. But as they were retreating, they came under attack from an American militia. Yet the colonists won this particular struggle, although not before a number of soldiers had lost their lives.

And hundreds of years after the close of the Revolutionary War – as in today – treasure hunters still find relics on battlefields dating back to these difficult times. Were Jessica and Simon among them? Did the artifact that they found once belong to a soldier, perhaps, or was their discovery something more prehistoric?

Although the Stono River is steeped in human history, what the Owenses actually discovered was something from the natural world. As she combed the riverbank, Jessica spotted something unusual poking out of the mud. Suspecting that it was something important, she grabbed her husband and asked him to record her on video as she took a closer look.

Jessica was right, as it turned out. Reaching down, she pulled something incredible out of the earth: a tooth as big as a human hand. But what fearsome beast could possibly have been equipped with fangs of this size? And how on earth had it wound up in Charleston, South Carolina?

South Carolina is home to more large carnivores than a lot of places in North America and even worldwide. There are, for example, thought to be two populations of black bears that roam the state. But even the biggest of these creatures only grow up to around 7 feet in length.

The tooth that Jessica found, though, was a staggering 5.75 inches across and weighed almost a pound. Far too big, then, for the mouth of a black bear. Plus the only other large carnivores present in the state are wolves, coyotes and mountain lions – all of which are much too small to have borne such an impressive fang.

So if the solution to the mystery cannot be found in South Carolina’s modern-day animal population, where did the tooth come from? The answer, of course, is the distant past. Because the state once looked very different to how it does today, and all manner of strange creatures used to walk, swim and fly across its terrain.

And one of the first fossils ever uncovered in the United States, that of a Columbian mammoth, was discovered in South Carolina in 1725. Massive creatures that sometimes reached 15 feet in length, could they be a candidate for the owner of the mystery tooth? Although they became extinct some 11,500 years ago, far older relics than this have been known to reemerge from the earth, too.

But – again – there is a problem with this theory. While mammoth teeth are typically oblong-shaped and blunt in appearance, the fang found by Jessica is pointed and sharp. It looks more like a modern shark’s tooth, in fact, than anything that once graced the mouth of a prehistoric carnivore.

Yet there is one likely candidate – and Jessica and Simon knew about it all along. From the time that they first set out to the banks of the Stono River, they were looking for something in particular: the tooth of a megalodon. And now they had found one. Much to their delight!

Because most of us tend to think that the Earth’s most fearsome predators died out with the extinction of the dinosaurs, some 66 million years ago. But the truth is that a number of terrifying creatures continued to roam our planet long after Tyrannosaurus rex and his ilk had disappeared.

And one of the most frightening of these was the megalodon. Thought to have appeared during the Miocene era some 23 million years ago, this prehistoric shark once stalked its prey through the oceans of the world. And for anything that found itself being hunted by this giant beast, it must have been a terrifying sight.

It’s believed that the megalodon looked similar to today’s great white shark, itself a menacing creature feared across the globe. But while these marine predators can grow up to 20 feet long, their ancient ancestors were capable of reaching three times that size. So it is considered the biggest fish to have ever existed.

And experts think that female megalodons were larger than their male counterparts, just like great white sharks. Equipped with a vicious bite, they would have filled the role of apex predator, feeding on everything from seals and dolphins to huge sperm and baleen whales. No surprise, then, that they remained at the top of the aquatic food chain for millions of years.

As the Miocene passed into the Pliocene era, megalodon numbers began to decline. Scientists had believed that it was the change in the global climate that caused their population to dwindle. But recently it has been suggested that a change in the food chain was actually behind the shift.

As other carnivorous sharks and whales began to grow in number, the megalodons found it harder and harder to hunt their prey. And eventually – around 2.5 million years ago – these huge creatures died out. Thanks to the efforts of fossil hunters like the Owenses, though, they did not vanish from history for good.

Megalodon teeth, you see, have been inspiring awe and terror for hundreds of years. Back in the 15th and 16th centuries, for example, it’s said that the fossilized fangs were mistaken for dragon’s tongues that had been turned to stone. But as early as the 17th century, some experts had begun to speculate that they came from a giant shark.

Then in 1835 the naturalist Louis Agassiz wrote the first description of this unholy beast, dubbing it megalodon, which means big tooth in Ancient Greek. The creature’s fossilized remains, almost always in the form of teeth, have been discovered in many different places around the world since then. And South Carolina is no exception.

When they set out to comb the banks of the Stono River, the Owenses had hoped they might uncover a tooth belonging to a megalodon. But nothing could have prepared them for the reality of coming face-to-face with one. And it’s clear in Simon’s footage that Jessica is overwhelmed as she pulls the giant fossil out of the ground.

“I’m literally about to cry,” Jessica says as she wipes away dirt and earth, revealing a tooth almost the same size as her own hand. Speaking to McClatchy News in 2020, she expressed her amazement at the events that unfolded. She said, “Who would believe that we found one that close to the surface? I always hear of people finding them by digging and/or diving.”

After the delighted couple announced their discovery, officials from the city’s Mace Brown Museum of Natural History were quick to congratulate them. One wrote on Jessica’s Facebook page, “That’s a great meg find – finds like that are why Charleston is known as the megalodon capital of the world!”

“Well done, we can tell you were excited,” the museum official continued. “As for an age, it’s likely weathered out of the Goose Creek Limestone, so Pliocene in age (3-5 million years old).” If accurate, this means that this particular megalodon was alive towards the end of the great predator’s reign of terror. A thrilled Jessica added, “If I never find another shark tooth, I will be just fine!”

But how exactly did the tooth end up lodged in the banks of the Stono River? Surely a creature as large as the megalodon didn’t venture this far inland? Well, experts believe that the area where Jessica discovered the tooth was actually once the ocean floor. So actually it is something of a hotspot for prehistoric relics.

So how does Jessica and Simon’s find measure up compared to other megalodon teeth? The biggest ever found reportedly measures a whopping 6.5 inches in length – some three-quarters of an inch larger than the Owenses’ specimen. But even so, the fossil from the Stono River remains a spectacular example.

And the couple were no less impressed by their incredible find. In an email to McClatchy News, Jessica wrote, “We were shocked. The tooth is just incredible and it’s mind-boggling that we now have a fossil on our mantle that is 3-5 million years old. Just wild.”

Jessica added that she plans to make something of a feature from the huge tooth. She wrote, “I’d love to get a shadow box or stand of some sort to display it upright.” Given their discovery, the Owenses may well draw other would-be fossil hunters to the Stono River. Whether they will be as lucky, of course, remains to be seen.