The ‘Ogopogo Tooth’ That Wasn’t: A Lake Country Find Points to Sturgeon

In early September, a small white object pulled from the bottom of Okanagan Lake briefly became the latest piece of “evidence” for Ogopogo. It started as a joke in an email subject line and ended, at least for now, with a fairly ordinary answer: museum specialists who looked at photos of it think it came from a fish – specifically a sturgeon, the large, armored fish that has long been offered as one explanation for Canada’s most famous lake monster.

A find off the dock at Coral Beach

According to Kelowna news site Castanet, which broke the story, Clayton Brown was spending a day at Coral Beach – a small stretch of shoreline below 50th Parallel Winery in Lake Country, on the lake’s northeast side – with his family in late August. His daughter, Chloe, jumped off the dock to search the bottom “for treasure,” as she sometimes does, and spotted something white in the soft, sandy bottom about eight feet down.

Brown told Castanet the family had “absolutely no idea” what it was. He described the underside as rough like sandpaper and the top as patterned, something he likened to bone or cartilage, split down the middle; his wife thought it looked like an arrowhead from some angles. He went back the next day and searched the same spot by hand for a matching piece but found nothing. A geologist he contacted through a friend in Calgary said it looked like a fossil but could not say of what.

Not knowing where else to turn, Brown sent photos to Castanet. His email’s subject line read “Ogopogo’s tooth?” – and that phrase, rather than anything in the evidence, is what carried the story beyond the Okanagan. By September 3 the syndicated radio program Coast to Coast AM was posting it under the headline “Odd ‘Ogopogo Tooth’ Found at Canadian Lake,” describing a triangular object “likened to a tooth” from the monster.

What the experts said

Castanet shared the photos with Bruce Archibald, a paleontologist with the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia, who is also linked to the Royal BC Museum. Archibald, whose specialty is fossil insects, at first said only that it “sure looks interesting” and that his first guess was part of a fish. He passed the images to a vertebrate specialist, and museum staff asked for more photos showing the object’s size.

In an update published later the same day, September 1, Castanet reported that Archibald’s working theory was a sturgeon scute – one of the bony plates embedded in a sturgeon’s skin – and that one of the Royal BC Museum’s vertebrate zoologists agreed. The zoologist, who was not named, said their “knee-jerk response is sturgeon bone,” noting weathered edges and what appeared to be grooves from the fish’s lateral line, and said no other freshwater fish in the region has scutes or bones with that texture.

My knee-jerk response is sturgeon bone.

A Royal BC Museum vertebrate zoologist, quoted by Castanet (Sept. 1, 2026)

The experts did not close the case completely. According to Castanet, they also raised the possibility of something from outside the valley – a piece of gar skull or the shell of a softshell turtle, neither of which is native to the Okanagan – that could have reached the lake some other way. Some later write-ups went further than the museum did: a September 21 roundup on cryptozoology writer Paul Seaburn’s newsletter said Royal BC Museum experts had “determined” the object was a scute. We found no published museum statement making a final identification; based on photos alone, the reported view is a preliminary one.

Why a sturgeon is its own small mystery

If the object is a sturgeon scute, it raises a quieter question than a monster would: how did it get there? Sturgeon are frequently suggested as the source of some Ogopogo sightings, since a big one can resemble a long, dark log in the water. But their presence in Okanagan Lake has never been firmly established. Tourism Kelowna, in a history of the legend, notes that there have “never been any official reports” and that eyewitness claims have not been verified. According to the same history, dams built by the 1920s cut the lake off from the Columbia River system, where white sturgeon do live, so any sturgeon in the lake now would have to be a very old survivor or have arrived by other means. Castanet noted that sturgeon have been reported in the lake for a century, though never verified, and that what appeared to be a sturgeon skull was found there in 2022.

Wikipedia’s summary of the legend says only that whether sturgeon exist in the lake “is unclear.” A single weathered scute in a beach’s shallows would not settle that question either: it could be old, could have been carried in, or could belong to one of the other species the experts mentioned.

The legend behind the headline

Ogopogo – a long, humped serpent said to swim the 79-mile lake – has roots in the traditions of the Syilx (Okanagan) people, who describe a powerful spirit of the lake, often written as nx̌aʔx̌ʔitkʷ, and who made offerings near Rattlesnake Island when crossing. The English name came from a 1920s music-hall song. Since then, sightings, photos and films have accumulated, and skeptics such as Benjamin Radford have traced many of them to otters swimming in a line, beavers, waterfowl and floating logs.

Against that background, the Lake Country find is a useful example of how a lake-monster story spreads: an honest family with an unusual object, a half-joking label, and a headline that travels faster than the expert follow-up. The evidence so far points to a fish part, possibly from a sturgeon. It is not a tooth, and nothing about it supports the existence of a large unknown animal in Okanagan Lake.