As someone who collects fossils and have worked at a variety of musems I can tell you this is fake. They’re created by taking a fossilized whale vertebrae and gluing a megalodon tooth into a lsit they cut. This is impossible as the vertebrae is oriented in such a way that a megalodon would be unable to reach it and that the force required for a megalodon to bury its tooth into the vertebrae this deep at this orientation wuld shatter the vertebrae.
Paleontologist here. I really doubt that that is authentic, most likely both of those fossils are real but they were put together to look like that and weren't associated during fossilization.
One, their colors don't match and while one is a tooth and one is a bone, material from a locality tends to fossilize in the same, or similar color. You don't get wildly different colors like the solid black tooth and splotchy coloring of the vertebra.
Secondly, and this is the most damning, that vertebra is incredibly weathered or abraded, I can't be sure which from a small photograph. This means that the bone was either exposed in the open or had edges rounded off by water flow over the surface of the bone for some time. Now this in itself is common to see on fossils, however, the Meg tooth is not weathered or abraded to nearly the extent that the vertebra is (you can see the tooth serration in the photo) so it is incredibly unlikely to have been stuck within the vertebra at the time of its deposition or fossilization.
The fossils themselves are both authentic, but their association and placement most certainly are not.
btcekp on January 25th, 2022 at 11:21 UTC »
As someone who collects fossils and have worked at a variety of musems I can tell you this is fake. They’re created by taking a fossilized whale vertebrae and gluing a megalodon tooth into a lsit they cut. This is impossible as the vertebrae is oriented in such a way that a megalodon would be unable to reach it and that the force required for a megalodon to bury its tooth into the vertebrae this deep at this orientation wuld shatter the vertebrae.
DeauxDeaux on January 25th, 2022 at 11:44 UTC »
It's cool but it's fake. https://www.fossilera.com/blog/about-that-badass-megalodon-tooth-in-a-whale-vertebrae
Spartan2470 on January 25th, 2022 at 14:30 UTC »
Here is the source of this image. Credit to /u/believemeimlying. His father bought this. Howerver, according to /u/LunarFalcon: