Susan Ewing - Resurrecting the Shark: A Scientific Obsession and the Mavericks Who Solved the Mystery of a 270-Million-Year-Old Fossil

This book features four augmented reality models, viewable with the Resurrecting the Shark app, available on Google Play and iTunes. To use the app, open it on your phone or tablet and wait for the camera to activate (menu is not active until the camera is on). Point the camera at one of the target art pieces at the end of the color insert in the middle of the book, and the model will pop up on your device. As long as you keep the art in the camera frame, you can move closer to zoom in, or rotate the camera around the art to see the model from different angles. You can also view the models without the book, through the app menu. (Model and app development led by Jesse Pruitt of the Idaho Virtualization Lab and Informatics Research Institute.)

___________

RESURRECTING

THE

SHARK

A SCIENTIFIC OBSESSION AND THE MAVERICKS WHO SOLVED THE MYSTERY OF A 270-MILLION-YEAR-OLD FOSSIL

SUSAN EWING

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WHEN I DROVE DOWN TO POCATELLO IN JUNE 2013 TO ATTEND THE OPENING OF THE WHORL Tooth Sharks of Idaho exhibit at the Idaho Museum of Natural History, I expected to see illustrations and fossils of the bizarre extinct shark Helicoprion . I never suspected the beast would seize my imagination and shake until my brain rattled.

Truth be told, I didnt go to Pocatello for the shark. I went because I hadnt seen my artist friend Ray Troll in a long time and he was throwing one of his famous after-parties to celebrate the exhibit, which featured his artwork. There in the exhibit hall, surrounded by astonishing fossils, life-size Helicoprion models, and Trolls beguiling art, I started asking questions. As Ray had obsessed for more than twenty years about what the shark looked like, I began to obsess on the storyall those chance discoveries, unexpected connections, absorbing sidelights, and compelling science factoids. Walking through the exhibit I met Jesse Pruitt, a tattooed combat veteran and undergraduate student, and his adviser-turned-colleague, thenresearch curator Leif Tapanila. I was taken by their backstories, as well as those of the other Team Helico members who had just published their breakthrough findings on Helicoprion . The more I looked, the more I began to see the Chinese knot of lives (animal and human, past and present), feel the undertow of deep time, and more fully appreciate the way the earth is in a constant state of change, with species rising, thriving, and disappearing.

I also happened to have a personal history with ratfish, the sole surviving representatives of the once very large and extremely diverse group of chondrichthyans (sharks and their kin) that included the dead-end branch that held Helicoprion . In the early 1980s, I co-owned and operated a small wooden fishing boat named The Salty, and my fishing partner and I hand trolled for salmon and longlined for halibut and black cod among the whales and eagles and rocky islands of Southeast Alaska. I vividly remember the first time a two-foot-long ratfish loomed up from the murky depths as I hauled in the longline. Its head broke the surface like some spectral alien being with big glassy eyes, a mutant-rabbit face, a nasty fin spine, and thin, spotted skin. I was enthralled. That ratfish laid the universe of underwater weirdness at my rubber-booted feet right there on The Salty s rolling deck, and Ive had a soft spot for strange sea creatures ever since. Now here was Helicoprion , bringing a fresh world of oceanic oddity to my attention in the landlocked museum.

We humans trace our evolutionary roots to fish. Specifically lobe-finned fish, a subset of bony fish. Sharks? No direct relation, other than the big-tent vertebrate connection. Chondrichthyans, set apart by their cartilaginous skeletons, are the bona fide Other. Not just evolutionarily. Sharks show no emotion we can read, no facial expressions we can interpret. They dont appear to play. They possess excellent hearing and sensory detection, yet have no organs for, or apparent interest in, making sounds. Much about shark behavior, physiology, and evolution remains unknown. Sharks are the strangers we cant pin down, and the puzzle we wont let go. Prehistoric sharks? Even more tantalizing. Mulling it over on the drive home to Montana, the Helicoprion story felt like a tale worth tracking down and telling. I quickly learned that while biological riddles supplied plenty of intrigue for the natural history account, the larger whorl-toothed shark saga was further propelled by the ever-shifting nature of science and scientific inquiry. When the tale opened in the 1880s, paleontology had just gained its foothold as a dedicated science. Today, the study of ancient life has morphed into a dynamic frontier of accessible data, ever-more-powerful technological tools, highly informed enthusiasts, chatty paleo blogs, and the blurring of once-rigid lines between science and artistic expression. Credentialed scientists rightly drive the work, but contributions come from many fronts, in many forms, with curiosity and resolve as the only nonnegotiable prerequisites.

Im not a scientist, but it seemed like being an outsider in a story full of outsiders was as good a qualification as any. So, tying myself into that crazy knot of chance and circumstance, I began to chronicle the nineteenth-century discovery, twentieth-century confusionand creative twenty-first-century paleontology that brought Helicoprion to life as never before, brilliantly executed by a quirky band of boundary-bending collaborators that looked more like a roots-rock band than ivory tower intelligentsia. At its heart, this is a story of questions and discovery, science and art, and the triumph of curiosity, passion, resourcefulness, and moxie over all else. But of course the soul of the tale is Helicoprion itself, the top marine predator of its time, who lived two hundred million years before T. rex stomped onto the scene. If dinosaurs have ever captured your imagination, prepare to fall prey to the buzz saw shark.

Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species , 1859

SCIENTISTS ESTIMATE THAT 99.9 PERCENT OF ALL SPECIES EVER TO SLINK, SWIM, FLY, fight, wail, or warble on this earth are now extinct. Its hard enough to pin down the number of species living today (one recent study pegged the wildly varying number at 8.7 million), but the number of extinct species is thought to be somewhere between five and fifty billion . Billion. Species. Extinct. Some of those billions made their exit in one of the five calamitous mass extinctions our planet has experienced to date. Others quietly faded away, outcompeted or unable to adapt to earths shifting terms and conditions, long before humans arrived to give them an extra push toward the cliff. Of those estimated extinguished billions, a random few percent are chronicled in the fossil record. This is the story of one of those fewthe one-in-a-billion buzz saw shark, Helicoprion , a species that survived over a span of some ten million years, between about 270 and 280 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs.