About 19 million years ago, something terrible happened to sharks.
Fossils gleaned from sediments in the Pacific Ocean reveal a previously unknown and dramatic shark extinction event, during which populations of the predators abruptly dropped by up to 90 percent, researchers report in the June 4 Science. And scientists don’t know what might have caused the die-off.
“It’s a great mystery,” says Elizabeth Sibert, a paleobiologist and oceanographer at Yale University. “Sharks have been around for 400 million years. They’ve been through hell and back. And yet this event wiped out [up to] 90 percent of them.”
Sharks suffered losses of 30 to 40 percent in the aftermath of
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