(CN) — During an extensive search for new fossil species, Jun Ebersole found one in an old box.
“A few years ago, I was looking through the historical fossil collections at the Geological Survey in Alabama and came across a small box of shark teeth that were collected over 100 years ago in Wilcox County,” said Ebersole, director of collections at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama. “Having documented hundreds of fossil fish species over the last decade, I found it puzzling that these teeth were from a shark that I didn’t recognize.”
Ebersole teamed up with David Cicimurri and Lynn Harrell Jr. to find out what this new species was, according to their study published Wednesday in Fossil Record. Cicimurri is the curator of natural history at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia. Lynn Harrell Jr. is a paleontologist and fossil collections curator at the Geological Survey of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
The team found that the shark teeth had small needle-like fangs on their sides. Because of that characteristic, the team said that these shark teeth belonged to the Palaeohypotodus genus, whose name means “ancient small-eared tooth.”
They named the newfound species Palaeohypotodus bizzocoi to honor Bruce Bizzoco of Birmingham, Alabama, who died in 2022. Bizzoco was a dean at Shelton State Community College, an archaeologist and a longtime volunteer at McWane Science Center.
When studying P. bizzocoi, the team compared the fossil teeth to the teeth belonging to various living sharks, including great white sharks and mako sharks. Cicimurri said that the team employed this method, because shark teeth have different shapes depending on their location in the shark’s mouth.
“By studying the jaws and teeth of living sharks, it allowed us to reconstruct the dentition of this ancient species and showed that it had a tooth arrangement that differed from any living shark,” said Cicimurri.
The team found that P. bizzocoi lived approximately 65 million years ago — about one million years after the dinosaurs died and the Paleocene period began. According to Ebersole, while the planet dealt with a mass extinction event, P. bizzocoi thrived.
“During the dinosaur extinction event 66 million years ago, 75% of life on Earth was extinguished by the asteroid impact,” said Ebersole via email. “Life in the seas was not exempt from this as it took millions of years for marine life to rebound to previous levels. This new shark was one of the top predators in the seas during this time when sea life was attempting to recover. Of all the sharks I’ve seen from the Paleocene, the teeth of P. bizzocoi are amongst the largest, indicating that it was a large shark. Because living sharks with similar teeth, like sand tiger sharks, are considered apex predators, it is very likely that P. bizzocoi was as well.”
Ebersole said that Alabama is a site so rich in fossil diversity that the state can help scientists uncover more information about understudied paleontological periods.
“In simple terms, this means studying the fossils from the last stage of the dinosaurs, called the Maastrichtian, and the first stage after, the Paleocene,” said Ebersole via email. “Focusing on such studies in Alabama will give us a better understanding of the true impact the dinosaur extinction event had on marine life and give us insights on the processes of how life recovered in the seas shortly after.”
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