From the UF News Desk

An artist’s rendering of an extinct white shark species similar to Dana Ehret's fossil.

This well-preserved fossil is the only intact partial skull ever found of a white shark that lived 5 million years ago.

Student Spotlight: Dana Ehret

Dana, a current SNRE doctoral student in the Florida Museum of Natural History, recently published his research in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. His findings made a big splash in the science community and have received attention from National Geographic, NPR and the Discovery Channel Canada.

According to the press release, Dana (and co-author Gordon Hubbell) analyzed a well-preserved 4- to 5-million-year-old fossil from Peru of an early white shark species. The fossil included a complete jaw with 222 teeth and 45 vertebrate intact. The study concluded that the modern great white shark is not a descendent of the megalodon, the world’s largest shark species. But rather, is more closely related to the mako shark, the megalodon’s ugly cousin.

According to other scholars, Dana has helped strengthen the link between the extinct mako species and the modern great white! Originally, megalodon and the great white were classified together because of the similarity of their tooth shape and tooth serration (specialized for eating marine mammals). Mako sharks have no serrations because they feed primarily on fish.

In an interview, Dana suggests the shark fossil’s coarse serrations are evidence of a transition between broad-toothed mako sharks and modern white sharks.

“Here we have a shark that’s gaining serrations,” he said. “It’s becoming a white shark, but it’s not quite there yet.”

Read about David Ehret’s Research:
The National Geographic News Article
UF Press Release