Mackerel Shark Tooth

Description

Mackrel Shark Tooth

4.2cm by 8.3cm

Otodus obliquus was a large prehistoric Mackerel Shark which lived during the Paleocene-Eocene epochs, approximately 45-55 million years ago.
This creature is thought to be at the heart of the White shark family tree and the original ancestor of Megalodon.  These teeth are found in hard sandstone rock matrix in the phosphate mines in Khouribga, Morocco.  The Otodus obliquus shark was king of the Paleocene seas 60 million years ago and was a massive and ferocious predator.

The features of these teeth are common to all Otodus species, a massive root and large separate cusplets flanking the much larger, and heavy center crown.  The characteristics indicate a highly developed and efficient hunter-killer.

Information regarding the size/diet of Otudus is gathered from its fossil teeth and a few fossilized vertebral centra. Similar to all Elasmobranches, the skeleton of Otodus was comprised of cartilage and not bone, resulting in relatively few preserved skeletal structures appearing within the fossil record. The teeth however, have been found in relatively high densities within the fossil beds of Morocco. Measuring up to 4″ in length, the teeth are triangular in shape, with triangular and divergent lateral cusplets suggesting Otodus’s diet probably consisted of marine mammals, fish, and other sharks.

Otodus obliquus is thought by many Paleontologists to be the original ancestor to the largest predatory Shark that ever lived, the megalodon. There is however another school of thought that suggests that the Megalodon was instead descended from Carcharodon orientalis and thus was the predecessor to the modern Great White Shark. Although the argument for both views is compelling, the evidence shows enough weaknesses to warrant caution in classifying Megalodon in the same genus as the modern White Shark (i.e Carcharodon) and therefore it has been reclassified, relatively recently, to reflect the mounting evidence that Otodus obliquus was the likely ancestor to the Megalodon.