Squalicorax Fossil Shark's Tooth Dogfishes Cartilaginous Fishes Chondrichthyes Selachians Elasmobranchs Lamniformes (2)

Giant Fossil Shark Tooth cm 2.3 x 2.1 h Squalicorax pristodontus Dogfishes Cartilaginous Fishes Chondrichthyes Selachians Elasmobranchs Lamniformes.
The fossil may appear not perfectly intact.
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Squalicorax is a genus of extinct lamniform sharks that lived in the Cretaceous period (100-65 million years ago). The name of the genus comes from the union of the words shark (from the Latin) + corax (from the Greek), crow.
They were medium-sized sharks, reaching a maximum of 5 meters in length (with an average of 2 m). The body shape was similar to that of today's gray sharks, with the shape of the teeth resembling that of a rose with spines, analogous to that of the tiger shark. It had numerous relatively small teeth, with a rectangular root and a graceful curved crown with a finely serrated profile, 2.5-3 cm long (the only Mesozoic laminform with teeth). A large number of fossil teeth have been found in Europe, northern Africa, and other parts of North America.
The Squalicorax were coastal predators, but they also covered the role of scavengers, feeding on already dead animals, as evidenced by the discovery of a fossil tooth stuck in the metatarsus of a leg of Hadrosauridae probably dead on the ground and fallen into the water. Other typical prey items were bony fishes, species of the genus Ichthyodectes, sea turtles and mosasaurs.
Squalicorax pristodontus (Agassiz, 1843) is the largest known and best studied species: from the size of its largest fossil teeth found, it can be estimated that it could reach 4-5 meters in length. He lived between the Campanian and the Maastrichtian: fossil remains have been discovered in deposits in North America, France, the Netherlands, Egypt, Morocco and Madagascar. Relatively complete remains (vertebrae and jaw fragments) have been found in marine sediments from North America. It is the species of the genus with the largest teeth: studies of these species have shown a precise correlation between the size of the teeth and the length of the body. S. pristodontus fed on rather large preys, but did not disdain the role of scavenger, feeding on carrion.