Birmingham’s McWane Science Center Announces Two New Fossil Shark Discoveries

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By Erin Harney

A team of scientists, including Jun Ebersole of the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, announced Wednesday the discovery of two new species of prehistoric shark that lived in the southeastern U.S. millions of years ago.

The two new species are ancient relatives of modern sand tiger sharks and lived 35 million and 65 million years ago, respectively. Until this discovery, members of this same genus, Mennerotodus, which are now extinct, were known to have lived only in Europe and Asia.

In order to identify these new species, scientists Ebersole, David Cicimurri, curator of Natural History, South Carolina State Museum, and George Martin, retired USDA soil scientist from Auburn, spent months comparing hundreds of individual prehistoric teeth to those of modern species.

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