According to Earth.com; During recent excavations in Mammoth Cave National Park, the world’s longest cave network, scientists have identified the remains of two new species of prehistoric sharks that roamed shallow coastal waters more than 325 million years ago. These unique fossils, which were found in the limestone layers of the ceiling and walls of the cave, belong to a group of extinct sharks called “Ctenacanth”. According to the findings of the research team, these ancient predators had a length of about three to three and a half meters, which is equal to the size of the white fin sharks in the ocean today.
The story of this discovery goes back to a time when large parts of North America were covered under a warm and shallow sea. Before the formation of the supercontinent “Pangea”, this environment was the habitat of a wide variety of fish and sea creatures. One of the exceptional aspects of this find is the preservation of parts of the jaw cartilage and skull in one of the species, which is rarely fossilized due to its softness, but the stable and protected environment of the cave has kept it in a very favorable condition. Examining the strong jaws and multi-branched teeth of these animals shows that their food was small fish and molluscs similar to squid.
The identification of these two new species, which have been introduced with the scientific names of Troglocladodus trimblei and Glikmanius careforum, has changed researchers’ understanding of the evolutionary genealogy of sharks. According to archaeologists, this discovery takes the history of the formation of some families of these marine cats more than 50 million years back than previously thought. Now, with more than 70 species of ancient fish recorded in this area, Mammoth Cave has become one of the richest paleontological treasures in the world, which can provide new keys to understanding how biodiversity existed in ancient geological periods.
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