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LOS ANGELES — Scientists have ultimately identified a new metal money of megamouth shark that lurch the ocean about 23 million years ago , nearly 50 years after the first tooth were discovered and then block .
The ancient shark in all likelihood prowled both deep and shallow waters forplanktonand fish , using its massive sassing to percolate nutrient .
A newly identified ancient creature was related to the megamouth shark,Megachasma pelagios(shown here). But unlike the modern shark, it had slightly longer, pointier teeth.
" It was a species that was known to be a new species for a long time , " say study co - author Kenshu Shimada , a paleobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago . " But no one had taken a serious look at it , " said Shimada , who described the new coinage here at the 73rd one-year meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology . [ 8 Weird Facts About Sharks ]
Shark teeth
Scientists first found shark tooth from the species in the sixties , but at the prison term , there were no like bread and butter beast , so scientist did n’t quite acknowledge what to make of the find . Over clip , research worker bend up hundreds of like teeth along the coast of California and Oregon . All the specimens were tossed in a draftsman and forgotten in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum and a few other California museums .
Teeth from the ancient megamouth shark had been found in the 1960s, but no one knew quite what to make of them until now.
Then in 1976 , scientists discoveredthe forward-looking megamouth shark , dubbedMegachasma pelagios , which feeds exclusively on shrimplike creatures called plankton . The shark use their mammoth mouths to engulf plankton - fill water , drive the water through gill equipped with a filtering apparatus called gill rakers , which direct plankton into the digestive track .
The monster beast is also a vertical migrator , meaning theshark lurks in the deep sea during the day , but come up to the shallow surface waters chasing plankton drove at night , Shimada said .
revisit a shark
An illustration of what the extinct megamouth shark would have looked like
When Shimada came across theshark teethat the Los Angeles County Museum , he was told that other scientist were studying them . But it turned out those scientists were n’t actively working on the coinage .
Shimada get through those scientists , Douglas Long of the California Academy of Sciences and Bruce Welton of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History , and persuaded them to take a second look with him .
The squad found the ancient creature was colligate toM. pelagios . But unlike the modern shark , it had more or less prospicient , pointier tooth .
" That indicate that they plausibly had a broad food for thought selection , " Shimada told LiveScience . " They could have plausibly eaten plankton , but they were also probably feeding on fish . "
The team determined the ancient creature would ’ve feature a slightly farsighted , less - wide snout than the modern megamouth shark . The extinct animal also likely grew to an average of 20 feet ( 6 meters ) , but the biggest megamouth individuals might have been almost 27 feet ( 8 m ) long , not much different from their modernistic relatives .
Because the teeth were found in both rich - sea and near - shore marine sediments , the out monster believably had already begun to migrate between the deep and shallow oceans in search of solid food .
It ’s still not clear what caused the sharks to evolve to have panoptic mouths and adopt an exclusivefilter feedingstrategy , Shimada said .
Scientists have n’t officially named the newfangled species yet , but the genus will be calledMegachasma , Shimada said .
The findings will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology .
