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Birmingham’s McWane Science Center announces two new fossil shark discoveries

A team of scientists, including Jun Ebersole of the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, announced Wednesday the discovery of two new species of prehistoric shark that lived in the southeastern U.S. millions of years ago.

How McWane Science Center discovered new shark species in Alabama from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.

The two new species are ancient relatives of modern sand tiger sharks and lived 35 million and 65 million years ago, respectively. Until this discovery, members of this same genus, Mennerotodus, which are now extinct, were known to have lived only in Europe and Asia.

In order to identify these new species, scientists Ebersole, David Cicimurri, curator of Natural History, South Carolina State Museum, and George Martin, retired USDA soil scientist from Auburn, spent months comparing hundreds of individual prehistoric teeth to those of modern species.

“By piecing together and examining the dentitions of these new shark species, we were able to determine that they are closely related to modern sand tiger sharks,” said Cicimurri. “It was so close, in fact, that we were able to use modern sand tiger jaws to reconstruct them.”

According to Ebersole, the front teeth are very tall and fang-like in both the prehistoric and modern sand tiger sharks.

“The teeth often project out of the mouth, giving the shark a snaggle-toothed appearance, which is perfect for feeding on fishes, crabs, squids and even other sharks,” Ebersole said.

The team examined shark teeth from various museum collections and found that Mennerotodus teeth were fairly common in the Southeast, but they had never been correctly identified.

“Our study is significant because it documents the first occurrence of Mennerotodus in North America,” Ebersole said.

“In addition, because the Mennerotodus mackayi teeth found in Alabama are older than those from other parts of the world, it strongly suggests that this group of sharks originated right here in the ancient Gulf of Mexico,” Ebersole said.

(Courtesy of Alabama NewsCenter)

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