Tag: cartilaginous fish

Almost-Living Fossils Month #21 – More Sharks

First appearing in the Early Permian, about 290 million years ago, the synechodontiformes were an early branch of the neoselachian lineage of cartilaginous fish, slightly closer related to living sharks and rays than to the hybodontiformes featured earlier this month.

They originated in the Paleo-Tethys Ocean and survived through the devastating end-Permian “Great Dying” mass extinction (~252 mya), then went on to quickly spread around most of the world and also survive through the Triassic-Jurassic extinction (~201 mya). During the Jurassic and Cretaceous they became quite common and diverse, taking over some of the niches previously occupied by the hybodontiformes and adapting to a range of marine environments from shallow coastal waters to open ocean.

Most known synechodontiform fossil remains are just their teeth, since cartilage skeletons don’t preserve very often, but there are a few rare body fossils that show they were varied in appearance with differing arrangements of dorsal fins and spines.

Paraorthacodus jurensis here was one of the species known from the Late Jurassic of Germany (~155-150 mya). Reaching lengths of at least 1.3m (4′2″), it had only one dorsal fin far back on its body, along with large pectoral fins and a low asymmetrical tail that gave it a superficial resemblance to the modern sixgill sharks.

Its teeth were close in shape to those of sand tiger sharks, and it may have had a similar lifestyle opportunistically hunting prey just above the sea floor in the waters around the continental shelf and slope. Remains of a chimaera in the mouth and gut contents of a couple of Paraorthacodus jurensis fossils suggest that smaller cartilaginous fish were fairly common elements of its diet.

A few synechodontiformes managed to survive the end-Cretaceous extinction 66 million years ago – but while the ancestors of moderns sharks thrived in the Cenozoic, the synechodontiformes never recovered anything close to their Mesozoic levels of success and instead began to decline.

The last known synechodontiforme was a currently-unnamed member of the Paraorthacodus genus, hanging on in the waters around Antarctica in the Late Eocene (~37 mya). If they managed to survive past that time it probably wasn’t for very much longer, and it’s likely they finally disappeared during another extinction event at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary.

Almost-Living Fossils Month #09 – Horned Sharks

All modern species of sharks and rays are part of a single lineage of cartilaginous fish known as neoselachians, and the closest evolutionary “cousins” to all of them were the hybodontiformes.

First appearing way back during the Devonian, about 400 million years ago, these early sharks were widespread around the world and incredibly successful as a group, living in both marine and freshwater environments.

Although due to their cartilaginous skeletons hybodontiformes are mostly known from fossilized teeth, there are still some complete specimens known that show us their overall body shape. They had two dorsal fins, each with a long spine in front, and an asymmetrically-shaped tail. Some of them also had small horn-like spines on their heads – this seems to be a sexually dimorphic trait, since the ones with “horns” also have claspers which show they were males – and they generally had powerful jaws with teeth specialized for crushing.

They were probably fairly slow swimmers most of the time, but would have still been capable of occasional bursts of higher speed, and various species were adapted to a wide range of food sources. Some had wider flatter teeth for cracking open hard-shelled seafloor invertebrates, and others were more opportunistic hunters that would have crunched on pretty much anything they could fit in their mouths.

Hybodontiformes were the dominant type of shark around the world before the end-Permian “Great Dying” mass extinction (~252 mya), and then went on to recover and flourish once again up until the mid-Jurassic.

Hybodus hauffianus was one of the Early Jurassic species, living around 183 million years ago in Europe. About 2m long (6′6″), it had two different types of teeth in its mouth – sharper ones in the front and flatter ones in the back – suggesting it was a generalist predator eating whatever it could catch. We do know its diet at least included the fast-swimming squid-like belemnites, since some fossils preserve clusters of their internal hard skeletons in Hybodus’ stomach region.

Towards the end of the Jurassic neoselachians began to diversify and take over most of the marine shark ecological niches, and the hybodontiformes became increasingly restricted to freshwater. During the Cretaceous they continued to do fairly well in those environments, but most of them still disappeared around the time of the end-Cretaceous extinction (~66 mya). Since most other sharks weren’t actually particularly affected by the extinction event, it’s not clear whether the hybodontiformes were more vulnerable for some reason or whether it was the ongoing competition from neoselachians that drove the majority of them extinct at that time.

Still, a few of them did seem to make it through to the Cenozoic, although they were absent from the fossil record until the Miocene. Freshwater deposits in Sri Lanka have evidence of a late-surviving member of the group living perhaps as recently as 5 million years ago – so they would have only gone completely extinct sometime after that, and we probably missed seeing them alive by only a few million years at most.

Edestus

Edestus, a holocephalan fish from the Late Carboniferous (~315-299 mya) of Eurasia and North America. A relative of the “spiral-saw-mouthed” Helicoprion, it continuously grew a single row of teeth in each jaw, creating an arrangement often compared to a pair of pinking shears.

Multiple species of this genus have been named, with varying degrees of tooth bracket curvature, and the largest may have had body sizes similar to modern white sharks – about 6m long (19′8″).

Since Edestus is only known from fossilized tooth brackets, how exactly its jaws worked and what it ate with them is still a mystery. Many reconstructions end up either goofy or horrifying as a result, and so I’ve attempted to make this one look a bit more “normal”. And capable of closing its own mouth.

Edit: This reconstruction was based more on chimaeras than on other eugeneodontids, and is therefore probably very inaccurate. When I originally did this image I wasn’t aware body outlines were known for the group. For a much more accurate version see my 2020 version in the “Weird Heads” series.