Amazing remains of great white shark’s giant ancestor reveal surprising diet

Incredibly, several fully articulated shark fossils have been discovered from the late Cretaceous period, 1050 to 72 million years ago, providing some much-needed clues to the mysterious shark family tree.

In the Lagersttte fossil bed in Vallecillo, Mexico, paleontologists made the discovery of a lifetime: several remarkably well-preserved fossils of an extinct genus called Pterosaur.

The fossils preserve not only the sharks’ joint bones, but also some of their cartilage structures, the outlines of their entire bodies, and possibly even their organs. These details reveal how a shark’s teeth and vertebrae adapt to its body environment, a new tool for phylogenetically estimating their size and position.

Fossils finally prove it Pterosaur It is a member of the shark family, which includes the great white shark.

Pterosaur The body length can reach 9.7 meters (32 feet), dwarfing the modern great white shark. Although their feeding strategies are also quite different: their teeth consist of crushing plates that allow the animals to feast on shelled animals that would otherwise be difficult to eat.

A team of paleontologists led by Romain Vullo of France’s National Center for Scientific Research wrote: “Our results support the idea that ovines were highly ecologically diverse and representative of the Cretaceous The dominant group of sharks in the 19th century marine ecosystem.

“Pterosaur probably fed primarily on swimming hard-shelled prey such as ammonites and turtles rather than on benthic invertebrates, and its extinction during the Campanian Period before the end-Cretaceous crisis may have been related to the emergence of the coccinoid Competition is related to the prognathous mosasaur.

Pterosaur Fossils have remained a mystery since the first fossilized shark molars were discovered in Britain in 1729. The rest, the cartilage, often doesn’t survive long enough to become fossilized, leaving a lot to the imagination.

Despite their fragmentation, these few remains found around the world provide enough clues to hint at the animals that left them behind.

Today, some sharks adopt a similar feeding strategy, known as “hard feeding,” which gives priority to this diet. The discovery of so many teeth but a relative lack of other remains in the Late Cretaceous fossil layer confirms that it may have had a cartilaginous skeleton.There are also rare ones Pterosaur The vertebrae we have are consistent with those found in other sharks.

It’s impossible to deduce exactly what these sharks looked like based solely on the types of remains they typically leave behind. Even our understanding of the famous megalodon is based on a lot of educated guesswork.

But then we got things like Vallecillo Lagersttte.

Lagersttte is a fossil bed whose remains are extremely well preserved, including soft tissue that usually decomposes before the fossilization process occurs. Vallecillo Lagersttte is where paleontologists discovered six specimens Pterosaur The true shape of this ancient predator has finally been revealed.

None of these fossils are particularly large sharks, with the longest being only over 2 meters long. But importantly, the fossils reveal the shark’s anatomy in the most detailed form we’ve ever seen, allowing the researchers to extrapolate that anatomy to other discovered teeth, inferring the shark’s maximum length of 9.7 meters.

We also now know how many vertebrae these sharks have, how big their eye sockets are, how many fins they have, the size of their heads and the shape of their bodies. This allowed the researchers to confidently classify the sharks as lamniforms and determine that they can swim at extremely fast speeds.

Their body shape is also unlike any living hard-eating shark, which really drives home how difficult it is to determine a shark’s morphology based on its teeth alone.In fact, it is possible Pterosaur It is the largest hard-eating shark ever recorded, and its size is much larger than the largest living shark.

“Newly discovered material from Mexico reveals pelagic ecomorphotypes that challenge the commonly held view that hard-feeding species Pterosaur are a group of seafloor-dwelling sharks that feed primarily on shelled benthic invertebrates, such as bivalves,” the researchers wrote.

“New evidence shows Pterosaur was an open-water, fast-swimming predator that preyed on well-armored pelagic organisms such as large ammonites and turtles, thus confirming a more active swimming lifestyle previously proposed based on morphological features of the vertebrae centers and scales.

We sincerely hope that the miracles will never stop.

The team’s research results were published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.