There was once a point when even Earth’s most notoriously dry spots were submerged beneath the sea. Going all the way back to the Cretaceous period, Egypt, the land we all commonly associate with blistering-hot desert sands, was once teeming with oceanic life, including ancient sharks.
Publishing their findings in Cretaceous Research, a team of paleontologists found 14 shark teeth in Egypt’s Abu-Tartur Plateau. Altogether, it adds five new shark species to a site where two other shark species had already been found.
During the Cretaceous, roughly 145 million years ago to about 66 million years ago, global temperatures and sea levels were much higher, leaving a lot of northern Africa underwater. The Duwi Formation, formed in the Late Cretaceous, is filled with vertebrate fossils, preserving evidence of what was once an ancient ocean that was especially productive at producing and sustaining life.
Egypt’s Desert Was Once Full of Sharks, and Scientists Just Found the Evidence
The teeth belong to five extinct shark species, all different from one another in shape and likely in purpose. Some were sharper, more needlelike. Others were broad and serrated. All told, the collection suggests that each set of teeth in each type of shark filled its own unique ecological niche
Egypt, which seems on the surface to be the modern-day antithesis of a place that can sustain life, was once a buffet for sharks thanks to deep water filled with nutrients that were rising toward the surface, which fed plankton, which fed smaller sea creatures, which then fed fish, who eventually fed the sharks.
While there is undeniable evidence that these shark species once called this area of Egypt home, there is also strong evidence that they lived together at the same time. The phosphate bed they were found in accumulated slowly over an extended period, mixing remains from different periods and habitats and adding a little paleontological chaos to the mix.
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