Great White Shark Origins Found

Great white sharks are among the world's largest living predatory animals, and now we have a better idea of their ancestors and how these toothy media superstars evolved.

Great whites turn out not to be very related to the extinct Carcharocles megalodon, the largest carnivorous shark that ever lived. Instead, they likely descended from broad-toothed mako sharks.

As you can see from the above photo, however, these sharks back in the day had impressive mouths and teeth too. The well-preserved fossil from Peru is the only intact partial skull ever found of a white shark that lived about 4.5 million years ago.

The species was named Carcharodon hubbelli for Gordon Hubbell, who donated the fossil to the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. The fossil jaw contains 222 teeth, some in rows up to six teeth deep.

"The impetus of this project was really the fact that Gordon Hubbell donated a majority of his fossil shark collection to the Florida Museum," author Dana Ehret, a lecturer at Monmouth University in New Jersey who conducted research for the study as a University of Florida graduate student, said in a press release."Naming the shark in his honor is a small tip of the hat to all the great things he has done to advance paleontology."

Ehret studying the fossil

He continued, "We can look at white sharks today a little bit differently ecologically if we know that they come from a mako shark ancestor."

That ancestor is 2 million years older than previously suspected, based on recalibrated dating.

Ehret said,"That 2-million-year pushback is pretty significant because in the evolutionary history of white sharks, that puts this species in a more appropriate time category to be ancestral or kind of an intermediate form of white shark."

He made the connection between modern great whites and C. hubbelli by comparing the physical shapes of shark teeth to one another. While modern white sharks have serrations on their teeth for consuming marine mammals, mako sharks do not have serrations because they primarily feed on fish. Hubbell's white shark has coarse serrations indicative of a transition from broad-toothed mako sharks to modern white sharks.

Read more at Discovery News