CREDIT: (C) VELIZAR SIMEONOVSKI, FIELD MUSEUM
ESCONI member and past president Karen Nordquist was honored by having a shark named for her. The details are in this Smithsonian.com article. The freshwater shark Galagadon nordquistae lived alongside SUE the T. rex, about 67 million years ago. More information is in the press release from the AAAS.
SUE the T. rex is the most famous fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota--the most complete skeleton ever discovered of the world's most popular dinosaur. When Field Museum scientists removed the rock surrounding SUE's bones twenty years ago, they kept the leftover sediment (called matrix). For decades, the leftover matrix sat in underground storage at the museum, until scientists and volunteers began meticulously picking through it in search of tiny fossils. They found the remains of a shark that lived in a river SUE probably drank from.
"This shark lived at the same time as SUE the T. rex, it was part of the same world," says Pete Makovicky, the Field Museum's curator of dinosaurs and one of the authors of the Journal of Paleontology study describing the new species. "Most of its body wasn't preserved, because sharks' skeletons are made of cartilage, but we were able to find its tiny fossilized teeth."
The team, led by North Carolina State University's Terry Gates, named the shark Galagadon nordquistae, a nod to its teeth, which have a stepped triangle shape like the spaceships in the 1980s video game Galaga, and to Karen Nordquist, the Field Museum volunteer who discovered the fossils.
"It was so tiny, you could miss it if you weren't looking really carefully," says Nordquist, a retired chemist who has been microsorting, or sifting through dirt to find tiny fossils, for the Field Museum for fifteen years. "To the naked eye, it just looks like a little bump, you have to have a microscope to get a good view of it."
