Jonathan Kieran

Ah, imagine the marvel of a lovely day in the Jurassic Period. The sun is stirring balmy winds over the ocean as YOU—an ancient lamniform shark about 33 feet long—are enjoying a hardy breakfast of mussels and clams buried in the shallows along the coast of Pangaea and then, BAM!
Some colossal tectonic shift in the ocean floor causes a massive tidal event and you, breakfast-in-maw, are suddenly overwhelmed with limestone mud and killed, your busy clamdiggin’ life brought to a close, never to know, understood or be loved … until some paleontologist happens upon your fossil remnant millions of years later and declares you an ancestor of something called a “Great White Shark”.

See, life DOES come full-circle for almost anyone. Even dead sharks can get their 15-minutes of fame with curious humans rambling around the planet, looking for seashells and old bits of beach glass. Of course, this particular sharky was likely found along a cliffside in Utah, hundreds of feet above a long-gone water level, but you get the picture.

The only thing that gets me in this article is the description of this shark as having teeth that were 22 inches long and 18 inches wide. Think about it. The shark itself was 30 feet long and its mouth were full of such teeth. This would mean that just one of the shark’s teeth would be nearly 1/10th of its body length and, at 18 inches wide, a mouthful of these teeth would resemble an assemblage of concrete slabs. Sorry, that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. A jaw filled with giant Chiclet-teeth going every which way? That would look like a 60ft. tall Gary Busey. Let’s be real. I haven’t seen anything with terrifying chompers like that since a sad relative whose canines grew into the visual equivalent of an oral prison riot.

You don’t want to picture a shark that deformed and ugly, so I have a feeling that Live Science needed a copyeditor for this piece. Even so, it’s rare to find such hefty sharks in fossil form, and it’s kind of nifty to see what the Great x 3,056 Grandma of a Great White apparently looked like. I tell ya—wait long enough and the world will reveal its treasures ad infinitum.

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[ Delightful new work by Jonathan Kieran is slated for major release in the near future so brace yourselves and think of England. This stuff is built for speed. Stay tuned for more … ]

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