Alabama paleontologist Jun Ebersole has done it again.
Ebersole is one of two researchers credited with the discovery of a new species of shark that lived roughly 40 million years ago, based on unique teeth found at a quarry in Louisiana.
Ebersole, collections director at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, said he’s published papers in scientific journals describing more than 12 new species previously unknown to science, mostly based on fossils found in and around Alabama.
That includes the Bryant shark, the Mancin shark, a duck-billed dinosaur called eotrachodon, as well as other sharks, bony fishes, stingrays and turtles.
The latest discovery, called the Carcharhinus tingae, is in the same genus as the modern bull sharks and dusky sharks, but its teeth were most similar to the requiem shark or the grey reef shark.
Jun Ebersole, director of collections at the McWane Science Center, examines the teeth of the Bryant shark, a species he helped describe in the scientific literature.McWane Science Center
Ebersole and co-author David Cicimurri -- curator of natural history at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, S.C. -- were examining the collections at the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, working on a book chapter about the fossil sharks and fishes of Louisiana when they discovered teeth that didn’t match any known species of fossil or modern shark.
Ebersole and Cicimurri then spent months comparing the new teeth to hundreds of other fossil and modern shark species to demonstrate that these teeth came from a previously unknown species.
The results of their study were published last week in the journal Cainozoic Research.
The newly discovered shark was named for Suyin Ting, who recently retired as curator at the LSU museum where the teeth were found.
Suyin Ting, recently retired curator at the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
Ebersole said the Tingae shark and the Mancin shark represent two of the oldest members of the genus Carcharhinus ever discovered.
“It’s kind of really strongly suggesting that the genus Carcharhinus originated here in the Gulf of Mexico,” Ebersole said. “They’re global now, you find them in just about every major seaway, but it looks like they may have originated here, just because we seem to have the oldest ones.”
For the most part, these ancient sharks leave only their teeth behind for researchers to discover millions of years later. But those teeth can tell us a lot. By comparing the teeth to modern sharks, researchers can determine the jaw positions of the teeth and reconstruct a shark’s jaw to estimate its size.
The teeth can also indicate what kinds of prey the shark would have eaten and what modern shark is its closest living relative.
Ebersole continues studying ancient shark teeth and other fossils to discover new species in Alabama. He is working on a book about the state’s fossil shark teeth showing why Alabama is one of the best places in the world to study ancient sharks, and to document the evolution of megalodon, the largest known shark species.
The Tingae shark is from a time called the Eocene epoch, when the climate was much warmer and sea levels higher, meaning large parts of the Southeast were underwater.
Ebersole said one unusual thing about the Tingae shark is that its teeth were found in abundance in Louisiana, but that he hasn’t seen one collected in Alabama. That might give a hint that for some reason, conditions at the time were different in different parts of the Gulf of Mexico.
“It’s strange for me to see species like this where I don’t have a single tooth of this in Alabama,” Ebersole said. “Maybe this turns out to be more of a deep water shark where most of the Gulf over here was shallow.
“Maybe there was a big river that came into that particular place at that time, which this shark might have liked, a more nutrient-rich, more brackish environment, which we may not have had here in Alabama. We just don’t know.”