#carcharodon carcharias
It’s Shark Awareness Day, so here’s a King Shark for ya~
MASSIVE GREAT WHITE SHARK PALEO-NURSERY DISCOVERED IN CHILE
For the first time, researchers have discovered the first prehistoric nursery site for Great White Sharks(Carcharodon carcharias) from fossil beds in tthe arid coast of northern Chile.
Great white sharks give birth in essential habitats, where young reside and grow in a safe place, free of predators and with plenty food. According to Jaime Villafana (University of Vienna), who led the study, “our understanding about current breending ground of great white sharks is still very limited, and fossil-nurseries are completely unknown”, until now, with the first clues.
He and colleagues analyzed statistically fossil teeth, from the Pacific coast of Chile and Peru, and reconstucted the body size and distribution patterns of the great white sharks in the past, from 5 to 2 million years ago. They found a high percentage of young sharks, in northern Chile, where sexually mature animals were completely absent. According to researchers, this fossil-nursery was much warmer than today, in terms of water depth, this area is interpreted as a shallow marine environment, with abundance presence of invertebrate organism, as bigger animals as horn sharks and semiaquatic ground sloths. This old nursery area is located in what is now the port of Coquimbo, a city with nearly 500,000 inhabitants.
- Researchers used fossil teeth, the only record left by the sharks, and through a regression, they modeled the size of the sharks that inhabited the place.
The earliest-known fossils of the great white shark are about 16 million years old, and despite its importance as top predator, they are currently threatened with extinction. This discovery provides a better understanding of the evolutionary success of one of the largest top predator in today’s oceans and could contribute to the protection of current nursery areas found in areas of South Africa, California, Australia, the Mediterranean and North Atlantic.
- Photo: Great white shark at Isla Guadalupe, Mexico, August 2006, photo by Terry Goss.
- Reference (Open Access):Villafanaet al., 2020. First evidence of a palaeo-nursery area of the great white shark, Scientific Reports.
- [Photo description: Main photo, Mature and healthy female white shark surrounded by a lot of small fishes. She is swimming below the water, but near the surface.
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