Ancient shark’s tooth falls prey to thieves
AUSTRALIA: A piece of fossilised tooth that once belonged to a massive prehistoric shark sat undisturbed in a remote, secret location in Western Australia – until last week.
Wildlife officials say the megalodon tooth, believed to be about 1.6 million years old, was removed and stolen from its resting place in the vast Cape Range National Park on the Ningaloo Coast.
Few people knew of the exact location of the ancient fossil, and the thief’s identity remained unclear, said Arvid Hogstrom of Western Australia’s Parks and Wildlife Service.
‘‘It was definitely a secret ... But it only takes one person to tell the wrong person and we end up where we are now,’’ Hogstrom told the ABC.
‘‘It could be someone who doesn’t know what they’ve taken. It could be an amateur collector who wants to add to their collection, or it could be someone who wants to trade it on the black market.’’
A member of the public told park rangers last weekend that the tooth was missing.
Hogstrom said the fossil was stolen just as his team was figuring out ways to secure it.
‘‘We’ve been looking at everything from bulletproof glass covers and other sorts of cages to enclose it. But obviously someone’s got in there before we’ve been able to [secure it].’’
The ancient shark species, which has a name that literally means ‘‘giant tooth’’, grew to about 15 metres long – three times the size of an adult female great white shark.
It weighed more than 20 tonnes, roughly three times the weight of a Tyrannosaurus rex.
‘‘A great white is about the size of the clasper, or penis, of a male megalodon,’’ said Peter Klimley, a shark expert and professor at the University of California at Davis.
Much of what researchers know about megalodon is based on the fossilised remains of its teeth. Researchers say it preyed on giant prehistoric turtles and whales, which it could chew with a bite force strong enough to crush a car.
‘‘Megalodon’s killing strategy was to bite the tails and flippers off large whales, effectively taking out their propulsion systems,’’ said Stephen Wroe of the University of South Wales.
Scientists say the species went extinct about 2 million years ago, during the middle of the Miocene era, though they have only speculated as to why. One theory is that the giant sharks were unable to adapt as the temperature of Earth’s oceans dropped.
Last year, 7-year-old Foster Frazier found a 13-centimetre megalodon tooth while vacationing with his family in North Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. ‘‘His father, myself and his younger brother were downstream from him at the time and heard him yelling what he’d found and saw him holding it up. We were speechless,’’ said the boy’s mother, Tina Frazier.
In 2013, megalodon sharks became the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary based on the notion that the ancient species might still be alive today. The film featured actors pretending to be scientists on the hunt for a megalodon off the coast of South Africa.
The documentary, titled Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives, angered many, including scientists.
‘‘If this megalodon special had aired on the Syfy Channel, I probably would have loved it,’’ David Shiffman, then a doctoral student studying shark ecology, told National Geographic. ‘‘But Discovery bills itself as the premier science education television station in the world, and they’re perpetuating this utter nonsense.’’