Everything ’s bad in Texas , or so they say . This appear to run to the ancient past times too , as a new shark dodo has been found and it ’s pretty huge . A mega - sized shark that swam around 300 million twelvemonth ago was unearth in what is modern - solar day Texas , and it ’s way bigger than many shark we see today . Earth ’s big shark , the Megalodon , could attain 18 meter ( 60 feet ) in length before it became extinct 2.6 million eld ago . This fossilized beast is 8 meter ( 26 animal foot ) long , which does n’t make it a platter breaker , but it is 25 % larger than the moderngreat white shark . The findings were announced at theSociety for Vertebrate Paleontology one-year meeting .
This “ supershark ” lived during the Carboniferous menstruum 359 to 299 million years ago – mode before dinosaurs ever plodded across the Earth . During this time , it swim through a shallow ocean called the Western Interior Seaway , which today would have submerge much of Texas and a great swath of the American West . The aquatic environment would also have been home to corals , clams , mollusks and bony fish .
Although sharks have been around for 100 of 1000000 of year , beginning with theiremergenceduring the Ordovician period , this new breakthrough is the Old “ giant shark ” ever obtain , at least 170 million year old than the old jumbo shark fossil .
One of the paleontologists still cautiously excavating the fossilized remains , John Maisey , said this month at themeeting : “ You do n’t see shark this size again until the Cretaceous [ the last geologic time period of the dinosaur ] , " as report byScience News .
shark do not , aside from their tooth , fossilise well : Their bones demean chop-chop after death . Theircartilage , however , is more effectively bend into a mineral flesh , and these are the parts that palaeontologist find . Maisey and his team used shard from the back of the shark ’s skull todetermine its full size . With this entropy , along with what is already known about nonextant supersharks , they were able-bodied to gauge its body distance .
The fossil supershark may be related to another extinct group of sharks : the Glikmanius , which had a similarly long dead body and a forked tail , and also lived in the Carboniferous period . More body of work is postulate to reassert whether this new shark is another Glikmanius or is in fact a steel new ancient shark species .
Sharks are , arguably , the perfect predator . Their basic form and doings has n’t changed for millions of years , so much so thatsharks evolvedbeforethere were Tree . The first tree , the now - extinctArchaeopteris , lived around 350 million years ago in dense timber , which is today the Sahara desert . Sharks – well , they ’ve been around for 400 million year , fend off a few aggregate extinguishing consequence , include theGreat Dying252 million years ago that killed over 90 % of all biography on Earth . In fact , only 5 % of the animal species in marine environments endure , so the fact that the shark family made it through this case , and later the extinction event that famouslywiped out the non - avian dinosaur , is a testament to their incredible staying power .
