Some 115 million years ago, a veritable fleet of giant predators prowled the waters near Australia. There were long-necked plesiosaurs, snaggletoothed pliosaurs with massive heads, dolphinlike ichthyosaurs, and now — suggests new fossil findings — 8-meter-long sharks.
The findings, published October 25 in Communications Biology, push back the age of the earliest giant lamniform sharks — kin to great whites and Otodus megalodon — by 15 million years.
“These sharks were serious contenders, playing the role of apex predators alongside dominant megafauna such as marine reptiles,” says Mohamad Bazzi, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University.
Such reptilian leviathans were previously considered the “sole sovereigns” of their aquatic domains, Bazzi says.