The Mississippian age (325 MYA) ancient sea and marine life preserved at Mammoth Cave National Park. Painting by Julius Csotonyi. NPS image.
NPS.gov has a story about some remarkable new fossil discoveries in Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The fossils date to the Mississippian Period about 325 million years ago and reveal a very diverse shark fauna. There are 40 species of shark, which includes six new species. The painting above and new information are being presented as part of National Fossil Day 2020.
A team of paleontologists, cave specialists, and park rangers at Mammoth Cave National Park have discovered a trove of fossil treasures that has yielded one of the most diverse Mississippian shark faunas in North America. At least 40 different species of sharks and their relatives have been identified, including 6 new species. Rare preservation of three-dimensional skeletal cartilage documented in Mammoth Cave allows us to understand the anatomy and relationships of these ancient sharks.
The discoveries in remote cave locations in Mammoth Cave National Park were made during an ongoing paleontological resources inventory that began in November 2019. The Inventory goal is to identify the many types of fossils associated with the rock layers exposed outside and within the caves in the park. Several of the caves in the park were known to contain the fossil remains of ice age mammals in unconsolidated deposits and fossils of ancient marine organisms preserved within the limestones in which the caves developed.
