by Tia Ghose, Staff Writer | June 03, 2015 02:00pm ET
A giant shark the size of a two-story building prowled the shallow seas 100 million years ago, new fossils reveal.
The massive fish, Leptostyrax macrorhiza, would have been one of the largest predators of its day, and may push back scientists' estimates of when such gigantic predatory sharks evolved, said study co-author Joseph Frederickson, a doctoral candidate
in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Oklahoma.
in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Oklahoma.
The ancient sea monster was discovered by accident. Frederickson, who was then an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, had started an amateur paleontology club to study novel fossil deposits. In 2009, the club took a trip to the Duck Creek Formation, just outside Fort Worth, Texas, which contains myriad marine invertebrate fossils, such as the extinct squidlike creatures known as ammonites. About 100 million years ago the area was part of a shallow sea known as the Western Interior Seaway that split North America in two and spanned from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, Frederickson said.
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