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During the Cretaceous Period, a genus of sharks roamed the sea with rows of unusual teeth. Mostly large and rounded, these chompers were not meant to slice through their prey, but to grind and crush shelled creatures.
However, since the sharks’ presence in the fossil record has mostly consisted of isolated teeth, scientists have been left to speculate on what the rest of this ancient predator looked like since itsdiscovery in the 18th century.
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“The finding of the skeletal remains in Mexico not only allow us to unite these teeth that have been searching for a long time for a skeleton, but also allow us as scientists to revise our previous hypotheses regarding its biology and relationships and see what we got right and what we got wrong,” said study coauthor Dr. Eduardo Villalobos Segura, an assistant professor in the department of paleontology at the University of Vienna, Austria, in an email.
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Because shark skeletons are made of cartilage, they do not fossilize well, typically leaving archaeologists only teeth and few skeletal remains to find. But evidence suggests the Nuevo León fossils ended up in mostly stagnant conditions that would have allowed for an oxygen-deficient zone, resulting in the preservation of the soft skeletons, Villalobos Segura said.
In the study, the researchers analyzed six fossils found at the site, including the complete specimen. Three other fossils were almost complete, and two were incomplete. With these remains, the study authors determined that Ptychodus belonged to the order of sharks known as Lamniformes, or mackerel sharks, the same group that the extinctOtodus megalodonand the modern great white shark belong to. Lamniformes also includes the modern species of megamouth, sand, goblin and basking sharks, among others.
“Present-day sharks represent just a vanishingly minimal portion of the astonishing biodiversity that occurred throughout their entire evolutionary history (spanning almost 400 million years) … studying fossil sharks is crucial to understand fully the evolutionary phenomena related to current groups,” said study coauthor Dr. Manuel Amadori, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of paleontology at the University of Vienna in Austria, in an email.
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“Without a complete specimen (hard evidence), what was known about Ptychodus beyond the teeth was largely scientific guesswork,” said Michael Everhart, an adjunct curator of paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kansas, and an expert onLate Cretaceous marine fossils, in an email. He was not involved in the study.
“The new specimens answer questions that go back 180+ years to the 1830s whenLouis Agassiz(an early renowned scientist and paleontologist)first coined the name Ptychodus,” which means rugous orwrinkled tooth, Everhart added.
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NSE Quality Stocks Expert Approved Trades ✌️【Easy Path to Wealth】✌️ Real-time stock and futures data, backed by expert stock market trend predictions, to help you make timely and profitable investment decisions. There are modern shell-crushing species, the largest being the Zebra shark, which reaches a maximum length of a little over 3.5 meters (12 feet) — not near as gigantic as Ptychodus.
“The crushing teeth together with the gigantic size make Ptychodus a very unique shark,” Amadori said. “(In the fossil record) some teeth are massive, polygonal and almost flat, while others have strange, rounded protuberances or pointed cusps on the top surface. All these were joined together to form massive tooth plates, which this predator of the past could have used to crush almost anything it encountered.”
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Often, researchers can tell apart the different species of Ptychodus by varying features in the teeth, but the study authors were unable to identify whichspecies of Ptychodusthe six fossils studied belonged to due to the teeth being too worn down, Villalobos Segura said.
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“(The April study) is a comprehensive review of some remarkably complete fossils of the strange Cretaceous shark, Ptychodus,” said Dr. Bretton Kent, an emeritus principal lecturer in the department of entomology at the University of Maryland, who has studied and lectured on the diversification of elasmobranchs (sharks and rays). He was not involved in the study.
“Our present world can act like a set of blinders, limiting the scope of possible lifestyles we can envision for extinct animals. … Modern durophagous sharks (that consume hard-shelled organisms) are demersal, feeding on or near the bottom. And their bodies are frequently small and not particularly streamlined. So a gigantic, streamlined, high speed durophage that was much larger than a modern great white shark is quite remarkable,” Kent added, in an email.
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