A teenage boy who made an unusual discovery on the beach went massively viral—after his mother accidentally posted his photo on social media.
Summer Levy, 48, lives in Washington State with her family, and told Newsweek they regularly take advantage of the rugged and wild area in which they live, describing it as “a very beautiful place, [with] lots to discover.”
“[I] have five very active boys; our best times spent are either in the mountains or the coast,” Levy added.
Now one of her children’s discoveries has gone massively viral—after the mother of five posted it to Threads by mistake.
“We do a lot of exploring as a family and love finding things on the rugged coast near where we live,” Levy said.
Recently, she and her 14-year-old son, Auven, were exploring “a very remote area off the coast of the Olympic Peninsula,” where he had previously spotted fossils, when he came across something completely different: an enormous whale bone.
“I work in radiology and [am] confident it is a whale bone,” Levy said. “My guess is a gray whale, as they often come close to shore to feed.”
Levy snapped a photo of her son holding the bone—which is almost as wide as he is—and shared it to Instagram to show off the discovery with family and friends.
But Levy didn’t realize she had also posted it to her other social media account on Threads. Instagram and Threads are both owned by Meta, and often link both accounts together once a user sets it up.
“I meant to post this picture on Instagram and forgot to toggle the button off so that it wouldn’t share to Threads, as I never really use Threads,” Levy said—and, almost immediately, she “started getting notifications, nonstop, of people liking the thread.”
On her Threads account, @summermarielevy, Levy shared the beaming shot of her son holding the bone, with the forest and wild water making a stark background, and wrote simply: “Look what my son found at the beach!”
Since being posted on January 10, the post has been liked close to 30,000 times, with users in awe at the find.
“WOW,” one user wrote, with others calling it “awesome,” “fascinating” and “amazing.”
“That’s a great specimen,” one impressed commenter said, with another declaring: “A day he’ll never forget! Good for him!”
A third user suggested: “You may be able to keep it. You would need to contact fish and wildlife conservation management for them to review your find. It looks like an old bone so some regulations may apply. Fossils are different. Nice find for your son.”
Levy said that she and her family have “found numerous fossils” on their expeditions in the wild, “but this whale vertebra was definitely his favorite.”
“I was blown away that that many people were interested in the picture,” she said, adding that her accidental post received close to 500,000 views.
As for what Auven did with the bone, she said he “left it where he found it—he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to take it.”
According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service website, regulations on when it is allowed to collect beach-found marine mammal parts depend on land ownership, and it is the collector’s responsibility to know whose lands they are visiting.
Collectors should always check for additional regulations from landowners before removing any resource from the beach—and it is prohibited to collect all animal parts on National Wildlife Refuges.
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