Archaeologists have found ancient tooth fossils with extremely special shapes in Shanxi – China, thereby helping to recreate the shape of an extinct ferocious shark.
Dr Zhikun Gai, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said they had found seven very special fossil teeth.
7 teeth shaped like petals, very well preserved from ancient limestone in Shanxi – China, part of the North China Craton, a rich paleontological site containing ruins from Paleo-Tethys ocean hundreds of millions of years ago.
The fossilized teeth are from the extinct shark Petalodus ohioensis, a small genus of Petalodonformes, a group of extinct marine cartilaginous fishes that thrived from the Carboniferous to the Permian.
The genus is known to be an ancestral species related to the modern group of “ghost sharks” described in the 1840s, so paleontologists were able to reconstruct this new species quickly fast.
Ghost sharks are rarely seen because they live in the very depths of the ocean, about 380-2,600m below the sea floor.
Scientists from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand also discovered an interesting feature of this creature – that is, female ghost sharks have the ability to store male sperm for later use.
Research shows that, like sharks, female ghost sharks possess 2 uteruses, 2 ovaries and 2 fallopian tubes. But male ghost sharks possess special, retractable genitalia on the forehead.
Source: kienthuc.net.vn
