A USC scientist has documented the prehistoric occurrence of a shark species battling a pterosaur, a flying reptile. (Illustration by Mark Witton)
Researchers from the University of Southern California made a surprising find while examining the fossil collection at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. One of the fossil specimens of a pterosaur was found to have the tooth, approximately one inch long, of a large shark wedged between the vertebra of its neck, providing a rare glimpse of wildlife interactions in the age of dinosaurs.
“Understanding the ecology of these animals is important to understanding life on Earth through time,” said the study’s senior author, Michael Habib, an assistant professor of integrative anatomical sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and a research associate at the Natural History Museum.
“Are there sharks today that hunt seabirds? Yes, there are. Is that unique or have big sharks been hunting flying creatures for millions of years? The answer is yes, they have. We now know sharks were hunting flying animals as long ago as 80 million years.”
The discovery is documented in the Dec. 14 issue of Peer J — the Journal of Life and Environmental Sciences.
The fossil, believed to be from the late Cretaceous period, was excavated in the 1960s and kept in storage at the museum until recently. The fossil was unique in that of the 1,100 specimens of Pteranodon, a species of pterosaur, only seven, or less than 1 percent, show evidence of predator-prey interaction, according to the study.
Pteranodons were flying dinosaurs that had a conspicuous crested skull, a wingspan of 18 feet and weighed about 100 pounds. They could travel long distances, land and take off in water and were known to have fed on fish and other marine vertebrates. According to the fossil record, the flying dinosaur was bitten by Cretoxyrhina mantelli, a shark which grew to about 8 feet long and roughly comparable in appearance and behavior to today’s great white shark.
It was the first discovered evidence of a shark preying directly on a pterosaur.
Habib said it’s possible the attack occurred when the Pteranodon was most vulnerable, sprawled atop the water. While Pteranodon could land and take off on water, they were ungainly at sea and took considerable time to take off.
“We know big sharks ate pterosaurs, so we could say a big fast predatory species could very well have eaten this Pteranodon when it entered the water, but we’ll probably never know exactly,” Habib said.