Science.-New Mexico’s Godzilla shark receives name and description

MADRID, 19 (EUROPA PRESS)

The Godzilla shark, a complete fossilized skeleton of a large fish that lived 300 million years ago and was discovered in 2013, has been given the scientific name Dracopristis hoffmanorum.

The new shark has been featured in the Bulletin of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) by a team of researchers from multiple institutions.

At two meters in length, Dracopristis hoffmanorum had 12 rows of piercing teeth on robust and powerful jaws, and had two 75-centimeter-long fin spines on its back. This combination of characteristics gave this shark the popular nickname ‘Godzilla Shark’ when it was discovered in New Mexico.

A group of scientists who had been participating in a science meeting at NMMNHS were visiting the El Manzando Mountains near Albuquerque to learn about the rare rocks and fossils of plants and animals preserved there. Just as the group was about to leave, John-Paul Hodnett, the lead paleontologist on the new study and a graduate student at the time, came across something unexpected.

“I was sitting in a shady place using a pocket knife to split and move through the limestones, not finding much more than plant fragments and some fish scales, when suddenly I collided with something that was a little denser,” said Hodnett, an ancient shark specialist. “At first, I thought that what had been flipped was the cross section of a limb bone, which was exciting since no large tetrapod had been found at that site before.”

Hodnett’s discovery sparked the enthusiasm of the multitude of scientists, and a team from NMMNHS quickly set to work to display more fossils, while the rest of the meeting participants returned to the Museum. It wasn’t until the next day, while Hodnett was working with a colleague on NMMNHS collections, that he revealed what had been discovered. “The Museum’s fossil prep, Tom Suazo, came in with this cardboard tray in his hand and a big smile on his face, saying that it was not a tetrapod that I found, but a really big shark,” Hodnett recalled in a statement. .

The tray contained chunks of rock bearing the imprints of fin spines, and the pattern was indicative of a ctenacanth shark, a group in which Hodnett specialized. Spencer Lucas, curator of paleontology at NMMNHS, encouraged Hodnett to investigate the new fossil, which turned out to be the most complete ctenacanth shark fossil ever discovered in North America.

After seven years of work in the Museum’s prep lab to clean and stabilize the fossil, research that compared it to other ancient sharks, Hodnett’s team determined that it was a new species of ctenacanth shark.

The name Dracopristis hoffmanorum, or Hoffman’s Dragon Shark, is in recognition of some of its Godzilla-like features (the largest fish found on the site so far and having large jaws and large spines), and in honor of the Hoffman family, who own the land where the shark fossil was collected.

By looking at the rocks where it was found and the Dracopristis anatomy, the team determined that the dragon shark likely lived in shallow lagoons and estuaries, navigating near the bottom of waterways to ambush prey such as crustaceans, bony fish and other sharks.

The large spines on the dorsal fin of Dracopristis acted as a deterrent against larger predators. “In the same rocks that dumped the Dracopristis fossil, we have found teeth from a larger shark called Glikmanius, which is known almost everywhere in the world at this time, and it would have been a large and dangerous predator,” Hodnett said.

The new Dracopristis skeleton also offers a new perspective on how ctenacanths fit into the shark family tree. Thus, Dracopristis and other ctenacanth sharks represent a unique evolutionary branch of sharks that separated from modern sharks and rays about 390 million years ago, but became extinct at the end of the Paleozoic Era, about 252 million years ago. .

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