LiveScience has an article about the curious discovery of a shark tooth. Back in 1965, the fossil of a large pterosaur, a Pteranodon, was discovered in the Smoky Hill Chalk formation in Kansas. The animal lived between about 86 and 83 million years ago. It had a wingspan of about 16 feet. It seems that a large shark, most likely Cretoxyrhina mantelli, tried to take a bite out this pterosaur, as one of its teeth was found embedded in the neck vertebrae of the flying reptile. A paper in the journal PeerJ details the findings.
More than 80 million years ago, a winged reptile called a pteranodon bobbed placidly on the waves of the Western Interior Seaway, which ran straight through what is today North America. Suddenly, the water below the flying reptile erupted into froth, teeth and sharkskin. When the chaos cleared, the pteranodon was dead and a monster of a shark was missing a tooth.
That's the picture painted by a new paper published online Dec. 14 in the journal PeerJ about a curious fossil: a partial skeleton of a Late Cretaceous pteranodon with a nearly 1-inch-long (24 millimeters) shark tooth embedded in its neck.
Granted, the researchers wrote, the story could be a bit more mundane. Perhaps the shark simply scavenged the floating carcass of an already-dead pteranodon. Either way, the fossil is a rare record of the sea and the sky meeting in the time of the dinosaurs.
"We've got good direct evidence that a good-sized shark took a chunk out of a big flying reptile over 80 million years ago," said study co-author Michael Habib, a paleontologist at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine. "It's pretty cool."
