Paleontologists in Kentucky and Alabama discovered fossils belonging to three new ancient shark species. These long-dead predatory fish lived during a time when the region was covered by a shallow sub-tropical sea and a waterways that connected ancient land masses older than Pangea.
[Related: Prehistoric shark called Kentucky home 337 million years ago.]
An accidental dental discovery
One of the new sharks is the species Palaeohypotodus bizzocoi and it is described in a study published February 7 in the open-access journal Fossil Record. Palaeohypotodus translates to “ancient small-eared tooth,” and it had small needle-like fangs on the sides of the teeth. Finding its fanged teeth allegedly happened by accident.
“A few years ago, I was looking through the historical fossil collections at the Geological Survey in Alabama and came across a small box of shark teeth that were collected over 100 years ago in Wilcox County,” Jun Ebersole, study co-author and Director of Collections at the McWane Science Center, said in a statement. “Having documented hundreds of fossil fish species over the last decade, I found it puzzling that these teeth were from a shark that I didn’t recognize.”
Upon investigating the teeth, Ebersole found that it likely belonged to a new species. It lived roughly 65 million years ago, during the Paleocene Epoch. This is just after the dinosaurs began to die out and more than 75 percent of life on Earth went extinct. The team believes that P. bizzocoi was a leading predator at a time that ocean life was beginning to recover.
“This time period is understudied, which makes the discovery of this new shark species that much more significant,” Lynn Harrell, Jr, a study co-author fossil collections curator at the Geological Survey of Alabama, said in a statement. “Shark discoveries like this one give us tremendous insights into how ocean…
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