Fossils provide rare evidence of ancient shark-on-shark battles
Fossilised shark vertebrae found within the US have provided rare evidence of ancient shark-on-shark battles.
Researchers and amateur fossil hunters have found the fossilised vertebrae of now-extinct sharks from millions of years ago, in four separate instances within the US.
A recent study published on the remains said each fossil bears evidence of shark attacks; all had bite marks and two even had teeth sticking out of them.
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Vertebra from an ancient requiem shark showed two teeth embedded within them. (Perez, V.J. et al. Acta Palaeontological (2021); CC BY 4.0) Supplied
Three of the fossils were found at Calvert Cliffs on the Maryland coast between 2002 and 2016, and the other at mine in North Carolina in the 1980s.
The vertebra are estimated to be between 23.03 million to 2.58 million years old.
The shark that had teeth left in it was an ancient requiem shark.
Scientists believe the individual survived the attack.
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This illustration depicts an active predatory encounter between two requiem sharks. Tim Scheirer/Clarence Schumaker
"CT scans showed re-modelling of the tissue around two partial teeth embedded in the centrum, indicating that the bitten individual survived the encounter," scientists wrote in the study.
While shark-on-shark predation has been observed in today's marine predators, evidence of it in history is exceedingly rare.
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Part of the reason why is because shark skeletons are made from cartilage and don't fossilise well.
"While shark-on-shark predation is common among living taxa, capturing evidence of these interactions in the fossil record is exceptionally rare," the study said.
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