Mammoth Cave National Park is not where most people would imagine shark fossils to be found. That's because the place is in Kentucky, in the United States. Yes, miles from ocean! That said, how did these animals end up there? Don't worry. We will explain to you what happened.
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The answer is very simple, as the park was previously submerged by the ocean, as well as several other continental areas. In this way, the fossils were there because that was the habitat of these animals a few million years ago. This, in fact, only makes the discovery even more important for paleontologists.
Since the 1990s, there was suspicion that there were fossils in that region, but only now has it become possible to find a considerable number of them. For this, a team of scientists had to work hard!
It took researchers crawling half a mile and also walking two miles underground in the park to find them. All the effort was worth it, as it was possible to find fossils of more than forty different types of sharks. The estimate is that these fossils date back at least 350 million years, so they must be from the late Paleozoic period, also known as
mississippian.
One of the most interesting findings in this discovery was, without a doubt, the fossils of Sibotus Stratus. It is an extinct type of shark. The animal was larger than the white shark we know today and could weigh more than two tons. So far, scientists have only found the animal's teeth.
Fossils of Sibotus Stratus must date back at least 20 million years, therefore not as old as other species. In addition, scientists still found fossils of six types of sharks about which there were still no records. Therefore, we can say that this was one of the main discoveries archaeological of recent years.