Treasures of the Titanic: The most valuable (and priceless) items found on ship's wreckage

More than 111 years since the Titanic set out on its fatal maiden voyage, a gold necklace made from a megalodon tooth has been discovered among the wreckage.

The treasure was discovered after Guernsey-based firm Magellan carried out the first ever full-sized digital scan of the ship, using two submarines to take 700,000 images of Titanic to recreate a total scan.

The images included a scan of a necklace made from the tooth of the prehistoric shark, encased in gold. The company is now using the passenger log of more than 2,200 passengers who were on board at the time it sank to locate the owner of the jewellery and find out who it would belong to now.

"We found a megalodon tooth which is fashioned into a necklace - it's incredible, it's absolutely incredible," said Magellan CEO Richard Parkinson, who said the discovery was "astonishing, beautiful and breathtaking".

Read more: How AI Could Help ID the Owner of a Luxury Necklace Found in the ‘Titanic’ Wreckage

It is not clear how the team identified the tooth as belonging to a Megalodon. There are laws preventing the removal of artefacts from the wreck and surrounding area - so all the identifying of objects has been carried out via photographic imagery.

More than 5,000 items have been recovered from the wreckage of the Titanic, which sank on 15 April 1912. Some of the items were discovered in the weeks immediately following the sinking, while others were discovered years or even decades later.

Here are some of the most prized items recovered in the wreckage:

The violin which played as the ship went down

One of the most famous stories from the sinking of the Titanic is that musicians continued to play as the boat went down.

The violin of Titanic bandleader Wallace Henry Hartley was found strapped to his body when it was discovered two weeks after the sinking.

Its case had preserved the violin, which was initially given to a Salvation Army musician by Hartley's fiancee, but was later sold for $1.7m (approximately £1.3m) at auction. It has been displayed in various Titanic museums over the past decade.

First Officer William Murdoch's belongings

A more recent discovery. Items belonging to First Officer William Murdoch were recovered from the debris field surrounding the wreck in 2000. Among the items were a toiletry kit, shoebrush, long johns and a smoking pipe.

The toiletry kit had Murdoch's initials on it and went on display in 2012 at Premier Exhibitions in Atlanta.

Attempts were made to locate Murdoch's family to pass on the belongings, but they were unsuccessful and the items are believed to have been auctioned off.

Jewellery

The megalodon necklace is not the first jewelled treasure to be found following the sinking, with numerous pieces of jewellery recovered after the ship went down. In 2012, an exhibition of priceless jewellery from Titanic went on display in the US.

Premier Exhibitions, which has thousands of Titanic artefacts, showed diamond and gold rings and other jewels that are believed to have belonged to some of the first-class passengers on board the Titanic when it sank.

Pocket watches frozen in time

A number of timepieces which stopped shortly before the Titanic went down have since been recovered from the wreckage and fetched huge sums at auction.

One watch is a gold-plated timepiece owned by Oscar Woody, who was a postmaster on the ship and one of the more than 1,500 people who died in the disaster. His pocket watch sold for £98,000 at auction in November last year.

The glass of the watch is smashed, with the time frozen, and the piece was part of a private collection of Titanic memorabilia before it was auctioned off in 2022.

Silver brandy flask

A silver brandy flask given to a first-class passenger shortly before he drowned on the Titanic fetched £76,000 at auction in 2019.

Helen Churchill Candee brought the flask, engraved with her family’s motto “Faithful but Unfortunate”, on board the liner.

As the ship was sinking, she handed her cherished family heirloom to friend and fellow first-class passenger Edward Kent.

Churchill Candee told him: “You stand a better chance of living than I.”

Kent was one of more than 1,500 passengers and crew who died when the Titanic struck an iceberg in the early hours of 15 April 1912.

His body was later recovered, with the flask among the items sent back to his wife.

Churchill Candee survived and received the flask from Kent’s sister Charlotte, along with a letter of explanation.

This described how the flask was “badly out of shape” following the sinking.

The flask was originally sold in September 2005 and went up for auction at Henry Aldridge & Son in Devizes, Wiltshire.

Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge described the flask as "one of the most powerful and emotive three-dimensional objects from the Titanic ever offered for auction.

The damage on it illustrates graphically the horrendous pressure involved when the ship sunk and certainly points to it being submerged at a fairly significant depth.

"It is a completely unique object with an incredible provenance which enables us to track its history back to 15 April, 1912."

Wooden cross

While not an item taken from the wreckage itself, a wooden cross made from oak which had been taken from the Titanic was revealed publicly for the first time in 2019 and sold for £10,000.

The poignant piece was made by Samuel Smith, who was on board the S.S. Minia when she took part in the mission to recover the bodies of those who perished.

Crew from the Minia picked up debris from the sinking as they retrieved the bodies, which were either buried at sea or taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Smith made the cross from some of that wreck wood in honour of the more than 1,500 passengers and crew who died when the Titanic struck the iceberg.

It had remained in his family ever since but went up for auction four years ago, also at Henry Aldridge and Son like the brandy flask outlined above.

Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said at the time: "The cross made from wreck wood from Titanic is without doubt one of the most powerful and emotive pieces of memorabilia of its type I have ever auctioned.

"The provenance is fantastic, we literally know the timeline of where this has been since the Titanic sank on April 15th 1912.

"The Minia [was] one of the ships that was given the unenviable task of collecting the bodies of those lost in the disaster and either burying them at sea or returning them to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

"In the course of this the crew picked up flotsam and jetsam, and this cross was made from some of that wreck wood by Mr Smith as a mark of respect to those lost."