A budding 13-year-old palaeontologist has already achieved the find of a lifetime after unearthing a gigantic shark tooth on a British beach.

The tooth is believed to have belonged to the notorious and perhaps legendary prehistoric creature, the megalodon.

Ben - from Hemel Hempstead - discovered the 10cm-long (4in) tooth at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex during a summer holiday weekend break.

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The teenager's dad, Jason, said his son was "over the moon" with the find and knew the second he saw it "it was something".

Essex Wildlife Trust confirmed that it was a megalodon tooth and was amazed to see it fully intact, something they explained to the BBC as a "rare find".

Jason and his son were on a weekend break from their home to go searching for fossils.

They arrived on Friday evening and by Sunday morning had already clocked up 16 miles (26km) of walking along the coast, but their effort was not to be in vain.

                                                                                            

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They were up at the crack of dawn on Sunday and were down at the beach first thing when Ben soon discovered the giant tooth under rocks at about 07:00 AM.

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.

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 told the BBC that the tooth would be from 20 million years old to 3.6 million, which makes it an incredible find for Ben.

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

Meg 2: The Trench:

The timing could perhaps not be better either, as another Jason, this time Statham, will soon return to our screens as Jonas Taylor, a character well accustomed to megalodons, in Meg 2: The Trench.

A sequel to the 2018 surprise hit, cinemagoers can expect to see several sharks emerge from the oceanic depths this summer, and it's coming with a handful of surprises, including not one, not two, but three ginormous megalodons wreaking havoc.

Meg 2: The Trench is due to be released on 4 August 2023 in the UK.