{"id":445520,"date":"2025-12-14T02:08:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T02:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/445520\/"},"modified":"2025-12-14T02:08:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T02:08:14","slug":"before-megalodon-researchers-say-a-monstrous-shark-ruled-ancient-australian-seas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/445520\/","title":{"rendered":"Before megalodon, researchers say a monstrous shark ruled ancient Australian seas"},"content":{"rendered":"

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — In the age of dinosaurs \u2014 before whales, great whites or the bus-sized megalodon<\/a> \u2014 a monstrous shark<\/a> prowled the waters off what’s now northern Australia, among the sea monsters of the Cretaceous period.<\/p>\n

Researchers studying huge vertebrae discovered on a beach near the city of Darwin say the creature is now the earliest known mega-predator of the modern shark lineage, living 15 million years earlier than enormous sharks found before.<\/p>\n

And it was huge. The ancestor of today\u2019s 6-meter (20-foot) great white shark was thought to be about 8 meters (26 feet) long, the authors of a paper published in the journal Communications Biology said.<\/p>\n

\u201cCardabiodontids were ancient, mega-predatory sharks that are very, very common from the later part of the Cretaceous, after 100 million years ago,\u201d said Benjamin Kear, the senior curator in paleobiology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History and one of the study\u2019s authors. \u201cBut this has pushed the time envelope back of when we\u2019re going to find absolutely enormous cardabiodontids.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sharks<\/a> have a 400-million-year history but lamniforms, the ancestors of today\u2019s great white sharks, appear in the fossil record from 135 million years ago. At that time they were small \u2014 probably only a meter in length \u2014 which made the discovery that lamniforms had already become gigantic by 115 million years ago an unexpected one for researchers.<\/p>\n

The vertebrae were found on coastline near Darwin in Australia\u2019s far north, once mud from the floor of an ancient ocean that stretched from Gondwana \u2014 now Australia \u2014 to Laurasia, which is now Europe. It\u2019s a region rich in fossil evidence of prehistoric marine life, with long-necked plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs among the creatures discovered so far.<\/p>\n

The five vertebrae that launched the quest to estimate the size of their mega-shark owners were not a recent discovery, but an older one that had been somewhat overlooked, Kear said. Unearthed in the late 1980s and 1990s, the fossils measured 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) across and had been stored in a museum for years.<\/p>\n

When studying ancient sharks, vertebrae are prizes for paleontologists. Shark skeletons are made of cartilage, not bone, and their fossil record is mostly made up of teeth, which sharks shed throughout their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe importance of vertebrae is they give us hints about size,\u201d Kear said. \u201cIf you\u2019re trying to scale it from teeth, it\u2019s difficult. Are the teeth big and the bodies small? Are they big teeth with big bodies?\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists have used mathematical formulas to estimate the size of extinct sharks like megalodon, a massive predator that came later and may have reached 17 meters (56 feet) in length, Kear said. But the rarity of vertebrae mean questions of ancient shark size are difficult to answer, he added.<\/p>\n

The international research team spent years testing different ways to estimate the size of the Darwin cardabiodontids, using fisheries data, CT scans and mathematical models, Kear said. Eventually, they arrived at a likely portrait of the predator\u2019s size and shape.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would\u2019ve looked for all the world like a modern, gigantic shark, because this is the beauty of it,\u201d Kear said. \u201cThis is a body model that has worked for 115 million years, like an evolutionary success story.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study of the Darwin sharks suggested that modern sharks rose early in their adaptive evolution to the top of prehistoric food chains, the researchers said. Now, scientists could scour similar environments worldwide for others, Kear said. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey must have been around before,\u201d he said. \u201cThis thing had ancestors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Studying ancient ecosystems like this one could help researchers understand how today\u2019s species might respond to environmental change, Kear added.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is where our modern world begins,\u201d he said. \u201cBy looking at what happened during past shifts in climate and biodiversity, we can get a better sense of what might come next.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WELLINGTON, New Zealand — In the age of dinosaurs \u2014 before whales, great whites or the bus-sized megalodon…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":445521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[205175,3425,347,10106,9251,57,159,2415,67,132,68,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-445520","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-205175","9":"tag-animals","10":"tag-article","11":"tag-climate-and-environment","12":"tag-fish","13":"tag-general-news","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-sharks","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115715487018893642","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/445521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}