{"id":179148,"date":"2022-12-15T16:22:31","date_gmt":"2022-12-15T21:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/?p=179148"},"modified":"2022-12-29T09:07:31","modified_gmt":"2022-12-29T14:07:31","slug":"massive-shark-tooth-discovered-in-samples-from-pacific-ocean-floor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/news\/massive-shark-tooth-discovered-in-samples-from-pacific-ocean-floor\/","title":{"rendered":"Massive shark tooth discovered in samples from Pacific Ocean floor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Fossil identified as from extinct megalodon<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Dec. 7, 2022<\/h5>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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From floor to ceiling, the University of Rhode Island\u2019s Marine Geological Samples Laboratory <\/a>is jammed with tons of sediment cores, volcanic rocks and other marine samples. Daily, lab workers sort through marine materials recently delivered by research cruises, cataloging the samples for loan to researchers, educators and museums.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou see these rocks in your sleep,\u201d said Danielle Cares, assistant curator of the repository. \u201cThey\u2019re interesting, but mostly to scientists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Danielle
Graduate students Molly Robinson, left, and Jason Almeida pose with Marine Geological Samples Lab assistant curator Danielle Cares. The three found the tooth fossil buried in recently delivered marine samples at the lab. (URI Photo by Tony LaRoche)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That changed one day about a month ago. Cares and two graduate students\u2014Molly Robinson<\/a> and Jason Almeida<\/a>\u2014were going through a shipment from the research vessel Nautilus\u2014about 20 boxes, each weighing around 50 pounds, of ferromanganese-encrusted rocks from about 10,000 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n

Hiding, covered in the black crust, was a fossil of a shark tooth\u2014which has since been identified as belonging to an ancient megalodon, a species of shark that became extinct around 2.6 million years ago. Mentioned on Facebook by the Ocean Exploration Trust (Nautilus Live)<\/a>, news of the find has appeared in numerous media outlets, including Newsweek.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was so exciting,\u201d said Robinson of finding the tooth. \u201cWe get a lot of cool rocks here, but we don\u2019t get fossils.\u201d<\/p>\n

That morning, as Cares entered descriptions of the samples into the laboratory\u2019s database at URI\u2019s Narragansett Bay Campus, Robinson was photographing a ferromanganese nodule when she noticed small ridges protruding from the crust. The ridges didn\u2019t look like anything she might have made with the rock saw, and she asked if she should chip off the rest of the crust. Immediately, they recognized they had uncovered a massive tooth, about the size of a person\u2019s palm.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were giddy like it was Christmas for a week,\u201d said Cares. \u201cThere were a couple of people in different labs down the hall and we got them in here. We were all like, \u2018Oh my God, this is the best thing ever.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Identifying the tooth<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Cares said they didn\u2019t initially think the fossil was from a megalodon. But she contacted David Ebert, a modern shark researcher at San Jos\u00e9 State University and program director of the Pacific Shark Research Center,<\/a> who preliminary identified the tooth as belonging to the long-extinct predator.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe morphology of the tooth looks clearly to be [from] a megalodon,\u201d he said in an email interview. \u201cTo further confirm the species, I would recommend asking a paleontologist familiar with this group.\u201d (A paleontologist has since agreed with Ebert\u2019s identification.)<\/p>\n

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, megalodons were among the largest fish to ever cruise the oceans, about three times bigger than the largest sharks today. Their name means \u201cgiant tooth\u201d in Greek, and their teeth were about three times longer than the average tooth of a modern great white.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult to determine when the massive sharks went extinct because the fossil record is incomplete, but the youngest fossils are about 2.6 million years old, according to the website Live Science. Fossil remains have been found off the coast of every continent except Antarctica, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. <\/p>\n

Ebert said that finding a megalodon tooth fossil is not that unusual depending where you are, but it might be a record for the location where Nautilus uncovered the fossil. <\/p>\n

The fossil was discovered over the summer during an Ocean Exploration Trust expedition to Johnston Atoll. The tooth was among samples collected by a remotely operated vehicle from the ocean floor, about 3,000 meters down, within the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, an unincorporated U.S. territory.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think this is a new record for this part of the Pacific Ocean,\u201d Ebert said. \u201cI do not know the range of these sharks, but I think they were global in their distribution as their teeth have been found on most all continents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oceanography Professors Katherine Kelley<\/a> and Rebecca Robinson<\/a>, co-directors of the Marine Geological Samples Lab, have been overseeing identification of the fossil with the help of Ebert, who contacted shark paleontologists for their expertise.<\/p>\n

\u201cThrough them, I think we\u2019ll be able to get a more detailed identification of the species and possibly an age range,\u201d Kelley said. <\/p>\n

Cares, Robinson and Almeida might have provided an estimate at the fossil\u2019s age. When they uncovered the tooth, just over a millimeter of ferromanganese crust was around and inside the tooth. \u201cFor ferromanganese crust, it takes a long time to build up,\u201d Robinson said. \u201cFor a rough estimate, it takes a million years to build up a millimeter of this crust.\u201d <\/p>\n

Mission of the samples lab<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Kelley likens the Marine Geological Samples Lab<\/a> to a lending library of sediment core and rock samples from the ocean floor. The 6,800-square-foot facility, which stores and preserves samples\u2014including sediment cores, volcanic rocks, seafloor glass, and hydrothermal vent samples\u2014is one of four National Science Foundation-funded repositories in the country. The samples are photographed and described in a database, enabling researchers, educators and museums to request them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese kinds of materials are really difficult and expensive to collect when scientists go out to sea,\u201d said Kelley. \u201cOur job is to make sure the investment that was made in collection of these samples is returned many times over through the archival of materials for continued scientific research.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Robinson and Almeida, the repository is providing samples to their own research now, and their work is giving them a knowledge of the repository that will help them going forward. <\/p>\n

Robinson, a second-year Ph.D. student who works on paleoclimatology in Rebecca Robinson\u2019s lab, uses microscopic fossils found in the sediment samples to study climate conditions millions of years ago. Almeida, a second-year master\u2019s student, studies submarine volcanoes in Oceanography Professor Adam Soule\u2019s<\/a> lab and uses the volcanic glass samples in his research.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking here has been great,\u201d he said. \u201cWe get to see how to do rock descriptions and what happens to samples. So, when you\u2019re out on a research cruise, you know where the samples end up and how they\u2019re stored. It\u2019s good knowing there are repositories where, if you need something in your research, you can check the databases and see if anything useful has been collected.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lab\u2019s collection now will include an ancient shark tooth, which, like the sediment cores and rocks, may be loaned out for future research.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the scientific community is as interested as the general public in the tooth, I imagine it will spend a lot of time in circulation going to different laboratories for study,\u201d Kelley said.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a shipment of rocks from about 10,000 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean, University of Rhode Island\u2019s Marine Geological Samples Laboratory discovered a fossil of a shark tooth, which has since been identified as belonging to an ancient megalodon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4762,"featured_media":179152,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[2737,2996,2995,993,301,2994,774,1225],"class_list":["post-179148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-adam-soule","tag-danielle-cares","tag-jason-almeida","tag-katherine-kelley","tag-marine-geology-and-geophysics","tag-molly-robinson","tag-nautilus","tag-rebecca-robinson"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4762"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179148"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179229,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179148\/revisions\/179229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}