A team of scientists today announced the discovery of a new fossil shark species from South Carolina. The scientists include David Cicimurri and James Knight (retired) of the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, and Jun Ebersole of McWane Science Center in Birmingham, AL. The new species lived nearly 30 million years ago, during the Oligocene Epoch of the Paleogene Period, and is based on approximately a dozen microscopic teeth that were discovered in Summerville.
The extinct shark's teeth are so small that one will fit on the tip of a pencil. The shark itself was likely less than two feet long and, based on similarities to teeth of modern species, likely ate a variety of invertebrates and other fishes.
The new species, Scyliorhinus weemsi, was named for esteemed geologist and paleontologist Dr. Robert Weems of the United States Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia.
“This new species is an ancient relative of living catsharks (right),” said Ebersole. “There are approximately 15 living members of this genus in the world's oceans today, but their ancestry extends back to the time of the dinosaurs.”
The discovery of this new shark was part of a larger study of the fossil sharks and bony fishes found in direct association with two whale skulls and a leatherback sea turtle.
“In addition to the new catshark, we found teeth of twenty other kinds of sharks and rays, as well as the remains of about ten different bony fishes,” said Cicimurri.
“What is also interesting about these fossils is that they date to a period of time called the Oligocene Epoch, which is not well studied in the US,” said Ebersole. “During this time period, the Earth's climate cooled enough for ice caps to form at the poles—the first time that had happened in more than 200 million years.” Ebersole continued, “This was not the Ice Age that is commonly depicted in movies or on television, but one that occurred almost 30 million years before Wooly Mammoths and Saber-toothed Cats roamed South Carolina.”
“Studies like ours help to determine how plants and animals responded to climate change in the distant past, allowing us to forecast responses to future climate changes,” Cicimurri said. “Sea levels were much higher when the fishes we identified were alive compared to today. In fact, the area where the fossils were found was once at the bottom of the ocean, under around 300 feet of water. Today it's a bustling city just outside Charleston, located roughly 30 miles from the Atlantic Ocean.”
The new species honors Weems' decades-long contributions to geology and paleontology. As a geologist with the US Geological Survey, Weems studied ancient sediments and fossils along the Atlantic Coast, making many important discoveries in South Carolina.
The study, titled “Early Oligocene (Rupelian) fishes (Chondrichthyes, Osteichthyes) from the Ashley Formation (Cooper Group) of South Carolina, USA,” was published today in the journal PaleoBios.
