Animals of the PastLucas, Frederic A. (Frederic Augustus)
Science
Animals of the Past
Lucas, Frederic A. (Frederic Augustus)
Paleontology
The great White Shark, the man-eater, so often found in story books, so
rarely met with in real life, attains a length of thirty feet, and a man
just makes him a good, satisfactory lunch. Now a tooth of this shark is
an inch and a quarter long, while a tooth of the huge _Megalodon_ is
commonly three, often four, and not infrequently five inches long.
Applying the rule of three to such a tooth as this would give a shark
120 feet long, bigger than most whales, to whom a man would be but a
mouthful, just enough to whet his sharkship's appetite. Even granting
that the rule of three unduly magnifies the dimensions of the brute, and
making an ample reduction, there would still remain a fish between
seventy-five and one hundred feet long, quite large enough to satisfy
the most ambitious of _tuna_ fishers, and to have made bathing in the
Miocene ocean unpopular. Contemporary with the great-toothed shark was
another and closely related species that originated with him in Eocene
times, and these two may possibly have had something to do with the
extinction of Zeuglodon. This species is distinguished by having on
either side of the base of the great triangular cutting teeth a little
projection or cusp, like the "ear" on a jar, so that this species has
been named _auriculatus_, or eared. The edges of the teeth are also more
saw-like than in those of its greater relative, and as the species must
have attained a length of fifty or sixty feet it may, with its better
armature, have been quite as formidable. And, as perhaps the readers of
these pages may know, the supply of teeth never ran short. Back of each
tooth, one behind another arranged in serried ranks, lay a reserve of
six or seven smaller, but growing teeth, and whenever a tooth of the
front row was lost, the tooth immediately behind it took its place, and
like a well-trained soldier kept the front line unbroken. Thus the teeth
of sharks are continually developing at the back, and all the teeth are
steadily pushing forward, a very simple mechanical arrangement causing
the teeth to lie flat until they reach the front of the jaw and come
into use.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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