Resurrecting the Shark
A Scientific Obsession and the Mavericks Who Solved the Mystery of a 270-Million-Year-Old Fossil
-
- 14,99 €
-
- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
A prehistoric mystery. A fossil so mesmerizing that it boggled the minds of scientists for more than a century—until a motley crew of modern day shark fanatics decided to try to bring the monster-predator back to life.
In 1993, Alaskan artist and paleo-fish freak Ray Troll stumbled upon the weirdest fossil he had ever seen—a platter-sized spiral of tightly wound shark teeth. This chance encounter in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County sparked Troll's obsession with Helicoprion, a mysterious monster shark from deep time.
In 2010, tattooed amateur strongman and returning Iraq War veteran Jesse Pruitt was also severely smitten by a Helicoprion fossil in a museum basement in Idaho. These two bizarre-shark disciples found each other, and an unconventional band of collaborators grew serendipitously around them, determined to solve the puzzle of the tooth whorl once and for all.
Helicoprion was a Paleozoic chondrichthyan about the size of a modern great white shark, with a circular saw of teeth centered in its lower jaw—a feature unseen in the shark world before or since. For some ten million years, long before the Age of Dinosaurs, Helicoprion patrolled the shallow seas around the supercontinent Pangaea as the apex predator of its time.
Just a few tumultuous years after Pruitt and Troll met, imagination, passion, scientific process, and state-of-the-art technology merged into an unstoppable force that reanimated the remarkable creature—and made important new discoveries.
In this groundbreaking book, Susan Ewing reveals these revolutionary insights into what Helicoprion looked like and how the tooth whorl functioned—pushing this dazzling and awe-inspiring beast into the spotlight of modern science
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ewing (The Great Alaska Nature Factbook), a nature writer and children's author, shares the century-long story of scientific investigation that resulted in the discovery of Helicoprion, "one of the largest predatory fish in the global oceans, the top of the food chain for ten to fifteen million years." Since the 1880s, when a bizarre fossil of what appeared to be a prehistoric shark was found in Australia, scientists have been attempting to figure out what this animal looked like and how it functioned. The fossil itself was so confusing a round plate with whorls of "fourteen serrated points" that the world's best paleontologists argued for years over whether the points were fish-spines or teeth. The whorl of points turned out to be a single curved tooth fixed to the fish's bottom jaw, much like a buzz saw. Ewing focuses on the group that solved the problem in 2013 while also providing accessible background material on basic geology, paleontology, taxonomy, and the scientific method. The details of shark anatomy can feel overwhelming, but Ewing brings to life the personalities of those who wrestled with these fossils to reveal "the beautiful, frustrating, addictive, rewarding way" that research works.
