Crow Shark Tooth Fossil
This tooth fossil once belonged to a prehistoric shark called a crow shark that lived around the world during the Cretaceous period 70–100 million years ago.
The significance of the fossils of this species’ is not so much what has been found but where they’ve been found. Nearly-complete crow shark skeletons have been discovered in the land-locked areas of Wyoming, South Dakota, and Kansas, providing concrete evidence that the North American continent used to be divided in two by a mid-continental seaway connecting the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
The crow shark was an apex predator, and its tooth marks have been found in the bones of many other prehistoric species. Crow shark teeth fossils are used as reliable geological period markers and evidence of an ancient sea.
This listing is for one tooth fossil. This image is a representation of what you can expect to receive. Most teeth are around ¾ – 1¼" wide and serrated.
CROW SHARK
Squalicorax, commonly known as the crow shark, is a genus of extinct lamniform shark known to have lived during the Cretaceous period.
These sharks are of medium size, up to 5 m (usually around 2 m) in length. Their bodies were similar to the modern gray reef sharks, but the shape of the teeth is strikingly similar to that of a tiger shark. The teeth are numerous, relatively small, with a curved crown and serrated, up to 2.5 – 3 cm in height (the only representative of the Mesozoic Lamniformes with serrated teeth). Large numbers of fossil teeth have been found in Europe, North Africa, and North America.
Squalicorax was a coastal predator, but also scavenged as evidenced by a Squalicorax tooth found embedded in the metatarsal (foot) bone of a terrestrial hadrosaurid dinosaur that most likely died on land and ended up in the water. Other food sources included turtles, mosasaurs, ichthyodectes, and other bony fishes and sea creatures. Tooth marks from this shark have also been found on the bones of Pteranodon, but whether the shark actively snatched such large pterosaurs out of the air, attacked them as they dove after prey, or was simply scavenging is not known.