SCIENTISTS have unearthed the first-ever well-preserved fossils of an ancient shark relative which now prove it’s a prehistoric predator unlike any other.
For decades the extinct Ptychodus left scientists stumped with very few traces, but its astonishing remains were found in the Lagerstätte fossil beds of Vallecillo in Mexico.
Ptychodus was once 32 feet long with teeth that were 22 inches long and 18 inches wide so it could eat hard-shelled marine life like turtles.
Their teeth also included plates so they could crush prey which is much different than modern sharks.
The massive shark relative lived during the Cretaceous period which was around 145 million to 66 million years ago and was alive when dinosaurs were.
Scientists have been able to determine from the fossils that Ptychodus is a type of shark from the Lamniform family.
This makes Ptychodus a relative of great white sharks.
The findings were published in the journal The Royal Society and the research was led by Romain Vullo of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
“The newly discovered fossils from Mexico indicate that Ptychodus looked like the living porbeagle shark,” Vullo told Live Science.
He added that Ptychodus has a “unique grinding dentition.”
“The discovery of complete Ptychodus specimens is really exciting because it solves one of the most striking enigmas in vertebrate paleontology,” Vullo said.
Vullo explained the fossils were exquisitely preserved because they were formed in an area where no scavengers were able to destroy the remains.
“The carcasses of animals were rapidly buried in a soft lime mud before being entirely disarticulated,” Vullo said.
The discovery of Ptychodus has been astonishing for the team of paleontologists and has proved its species was a dominant one at the time it was alive.
“Our results support the view that lamniforms were ecomorphologically highly diverse and represented the dominant group of sharks in Cretaceous marine ecosystems,” the paper said.
The ancient white shark relative mostly fed on other giant sea life making it a beast of its time.
Its main courses are believed to have included large ammonites which are a type of crustacean with a hard shell and hard-shell sea turtles.
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“Ptychodus may have fed predominantly on nektonic hard-shelled prey items such as ammonites and sea turtles rather than on benthic invertebrates, the paper said.
However, Ptychodus’s extinction may have been caused due to competition with other large marine life that were going for the same prey.
This includes large marine reptiles that were emerging at the time.
“Toward the end of the Cretaceous, these large sharks were likely in direct competition with some marine reptiles (mosasaurs) targeting the same prey,” Vullo said, per Live Science.
The paper explained that “its extinction during the Campanian, well before the end-Cretaceous crisis, might have been related to competition with emerging blunt-toothed globidensine and prognathodontine mosasaurs.”
