Tens of millions of years before the megalodon, a massive shark was running the oceans. According to new research, a previously overlooked set of fossils found near Darwin, Australia, belonged to the earliest known mega-predatory shark in the modern shark lineage.
It turns out the big fella existed way earlier than scientists thought was even possible. The shark lived around 115 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period. That’s when the ocean was packed with a wide variety of nightmarish creatures, such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs.
Modern shark ancestors, known as lamniforms, were believed to be relatively small when they first appeared in the fossil record about 135 million years ago. The discovery of this mega-shark obviously shakes that up quite a bit. These fossils suggest that some lamniforms had already reached sizes of up to eight meters long.
Before the Megalodon, an Even Bigger Shark Ruled the Oceans
The AP reports that the evidence came from five vertebrae measuring about 12 centimeters across. It was initially unearthed in the late 20th century and then stored in museum collections for decades.
Vertebrae are rare in shark paleontology because sharks are made of cartilage, not bone, and usually leave behind only teeth. Teeth can tell you a lot about what the shark ate, and vertebrae tell you how big the thing actually was. This particular set of vertebrae told us this thing was huge.
Researchers concluded that this shark looked and acted a lot like today’s large sharks. It had the same basic body layout, and it was an apex predator. Evolution nailed the design of the modern shark a long time ago and never really looked back.
One of the biggest revelations to come from this is that sharks didn’t evolve into the apex predators they are today over the years. They rushed to the top of the predatory charts in record time. They quickly adapted to dramatic climate shifts and rapidly changing ecosystems.
In some ways, that could offer us clues about how today’s ocean predators might respond to the environmental madness the rapid onset of climate change has us gripped within.
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