'Winged' eagle shark soared through oceans 93 million years ago

[Judi Lynn]

By Laura Geggel - Editor an hour ago

It looked like a cross between a shark and a manta ray.



An illustration of the newly described eagle shark, which lived in an ancient seaway 93 million years ago. (Image credit: Oscar Sanisidro)


A bizarre shark with wing-like fins and a wide, gaping mouth soared through the seas of what is now Mexico about 93 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, a new study finds.

This odd shark — dubbed Aquilolamna milarcae, or eagle shark of the Milarca Museum, where its fossil will go on display — looks remarkably like manta and devil rays, which also sport finned "wings." (Rays are closely related to, but are not, sharks.) This shark lived more than 30 million years before either of those creatures existed, the researchers said.

That's not the only similarity: This ancient shark was likely a filter feeder that gulped down tiny plankton-like critters when it was hungry, just like manta and devil rays do today. So, it's likely that the eagle shark lived in the same type of marine real estate that modern manta and devil rays do now, said study lead researcher Romain Vullo, a vertebrate paleontologist with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at Geosciences Rennes, in France.

A quarryman discovered the eagle shark specimen — a slab of limestone that preserved most of the shark's fossilized skeleton and imprints of its soft tissues — in Nuevo León, a state in northeastern Mexico, in 2012. When this shark was alive, that part of Mexico was covered by the Western Interior Seaway, a body of water that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/ancient-shark-flew-through-dinosaur-age-seas.html

[sandensea]

1. Cue the next 'Sharktopus' plot!

Mind you that, though a horror fan myself, I've never cared for those (they're ludicrous - even for a creature feature!).

But there's no denying they have a lot of fans, judging by how many Sharknado/Sharktopus movies they've made.

Thanks for finding and posting this, Judi. The deep seas really are the next frontier.