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  • Victor Perez commented on Bill Moher‘s Fossil #010802 7 years, 6 months ago

    7 years, 6 months ago
    7 years, 6 months ago

    @bkent do you think this is a serrated thresher or a broken Megalodon tooth?

    • It certainly looks like a serrated thresher to me, as the serrations are too large for megalodon. The mesial cutting edge is broadly convex; in megalodon from similar tooth positions it would be more sigmoidal. Also, although the shape of the root lobes is typical of the giant threshers. The one odd feature is that the neck appears wide on the lingual face, but this is probably due to poor preservation. I have examined a serrated thresher where half of the tooth was exposed for some period of time, while the other half was protected in the matrix. The exposed half had a broad, rather irregular neck area as on this tooth, while the protected half was better preserved and had the typical narrow neck of a thresher.

    • Thanks Dr. Kent! (@bkent)

      @billmoher Looks like you’ve got a fairly rare tooth here. This is an unnamed species of giant thresher shark (Genus Alopias). Here is an example from Dr. Bretton Kent http://community.myfossil.org/fossils/1931/

    • @vperez thanks for the information! I just brought this tooth to the CMM Fossil Club this weekend to show Dr. Stephen Godfrey – he was interested in the pathology on the front of the tooth. It is part of the enamel. I’ll update the tooth id and post a couple of additional photos here.

    • I was wondering about that. It’s so strange that I couldn’t decide if it was natural or something stuck to the tooth. It looks like ripple marks in the enamel. Did Dr. Godfrey have any theories on what could have caused it?

    • No, but he examined it under a magnifying glass and confirmed that it is part of the enamel and not something that attached to the tooth afterwards. I sent him the two new photos I just added to the posting.