Discovering Sharks

Discovering Sharks — page 3 — FALCATUS falcatus FALCATUS WHEN Carboniferous Period LENGTH About 6 to 12 inches LOOK FOR A long painting forward dorsal spine which is only on males SCIENCE BITE One well preserved fossil clearly shows a female biting the dorsal spine of a male while in the act of mating The unusual dorsal spine may have been a way for males to attract females These little sharks swam in schools and preyed on smaller fish and invertebrates Is this Falcatus eying its next meal Tullimonstrum was a mysterious free swimming invertebrate with tiny teeth and stalked eyes Smaller ones may have been prey for Falcatus but large ones could be twice the size of these small sharks 6

Discovering Sharks — page 4 — PREHISTORIC SHARKS Long before mammals walked the earth even before the first dinosaurs fish ruled the world Without ice at the poles more of our planet was under water The Devonian Period about 420 to 360 million years ago is sometimes called the Age of Fishes because of the astounding diversity of fish species that swam the vast ocean Sharks continued to evolve into all the amazing species we know today as well as other species that didn’t survive the environmental changes that occurred over these millions of years Some of those extinct prehistoric species appear on the following pages as they might have looked in a different earlier world We can learn a lot about our planet’s past by studying fossils the preserved remains of plants and animals We know that like today the fish of the Devonian included sharks and fishes with bony skeletons Scientists note that unlike our current bony fishes day modern sharks are remarkably similar to their long ago ancestors In fact most day modern shark groups have been around for 100 million years On the following pages you’ll notice some of the similarities the prehistoric sharks have to our modern day sharks The crow shark and the megalodon will surely make you think of modern day white sharks and the eyebrow spines of the Hybodus may make you think of a horn shark Other species like the fascinating Falcatus the slithering Xenacanthus and the perplexing tooth whorl shark are unlike anything we’ve ever seen in today’s oceans

Discovering Sharks — page 5 — MEGALODON Carcharocles megalodon WHEN Miocene Period and Pliocene Period LENGTH Up to 50 feet making it the world’s biggest shark ever LOOK FOR Huge serrated teeth some 7 inches tall SCIENCE BITE The enormous Carcharocles probably ate prehistoric whales sea turtles and dugongs but not dinosaurs This species didn’t show up until after dinosaurs were extinct This shark’s fossil teeth have been uncovered on every continent Smaller teeth found in Central America and the southern United States are clues that the shallow prehistoric ocean between North and South America was a nursery ground for juvenile megalodons 16 to 2 6 old year million megalodon shark tooth It doesn’t look like this Platybelodon is going to escape the mighty Carcharocles An extinct relative of the elephant Platybelodon was a plant eater that stripped bark and uprooted plants with its lower pair of tusks Like day modern elephants a Platybelodon probably used its trunk as a snorkel 8

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