If you ever visit the beach you have likely seen strange people on their own equipped with nothing but a metal detector. I have often wondered what these people are hoping to find as they explore the beach. Do they think they will find pirate treasure from 100 years ago or do they simply want to find a drunk teenager’s phone from the weekend? If you are as skeptical as I am then this article is for you because these treasure hunters are not as silly as I previously thought. Join us as we dive into the strangest discoveries ever found on a beach.
Free Lego
As a child when we dream of treasure it is often unrealistic things like toys that we hope to find. However, no one in their right mind buries toys. Yet one man discovered a giant lego man in 2012. The man (the real one, not the lego one) was looking out on the beach when saw something bobbing in the water. He went in to retrieve it and when he realized it was a massive lego man he started to drag it to shore. It turned out the lego man was eight feet tall, what an incredible find! To this day no one knows where it came from or why it floated to shore but it remains at the beach and has become a bit of a tourist attraction. Everyone wants to have their photo with the mystery lego man.
Old fossils
It makes sense that some of the best finds have been fossils too. Archaeologists once dug up the fossils of a 180 million-year-old fish lizard. The fish is forty feet long and is currently on display at Charmouth Fossils.
The strange rock
If your child is ever at the beach and starts to play with some strange material it is always wise to pull her away. However, if you let them play with it, and take it home, you could make a fortune. Charlie Naysmith was only 8 years old when he discovered a rare treasure on the coast of a British beach. He found an orange rock and showed his parents. They couldn’t explain what it was either so took it home. It turned out to be whale vomit or what is scientifically referred to as ambergris. It turns out ambergris is so rare that it is worth a lot of money. The rock he found was sold for over $60,000.
A plane
While all of the treasures mentioned above are pretty amazing. There must have been nothing stranger than when beachgoers were walking along the sand one day and saw a full plane on the side of the sand. A world war two plane had turned up on the shore after crashing sixty years earlier. It crashed off the coast of Wales in 1942 and made its way to the top of the ocean in 2007. This incredible resurrection shows how strange and wonderful the ocean is.
Cannonballs
If we needed further proof of the strange behavior of the oceans, they recently resurrected some cannonballs from the American Civil War. The cannonballs washed up in South Carolina in 2016 and a bomb squad was called in the unlikely event that they were still dangerous.
The sea is an incredible place and while many things are lost to the bottom of the ocean some are clearly returned. The next time you are walking on the beach dig your toes into the sand and ponder on what may lie beneath. If you dig more than anyone else has dug before there may be treasure to be found.
