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In the spring of 2015, doctoral student Victor Perez was working with high school students and casts of giant fish teeth. And not just any fish—it was the monster of the Miocene, Megalodon (Otodus megalodon).
During his time studying geology at the University of Florida, Perez had volunteered at a school in Tampa and another in Aptos, California, as part of a program that paired paleontologists with teachers. His job was to bring the scientific method into the classroom, and he had an extraordinary specimen to work with: a 3-D–printed cast of a nearly complete set of multiple Megalodon teeth from the same individual—what’s known as an associated dentition. The teeth themselves had been donated by private collector Gordon Hubbell to the Florida Museum of Natural History just that year.
For the Florida students, Perez had only a copy of the anterior part of the dentition, ...
