Ancient remains of gigantic shark found near Fort Worth, Texas





Photo from Researchers estimated the shark was at least 20 feet long, making it one of the biggest Texas predators of its era, 140 million years ago.Photo from Plos One open source journal



Photo from Researchers estimated the shark was at least 20 feet long, making it one of the biggest Texas predators of its era, 140 million years ago.Photo from Plos One open source journal Photo: Joseph A. Frederickson , Scott N. Schaefer, Janessa A. Doucette-Frederickson Photo: Joseph A. Frederickson , Scott N. Schaefer, Janessa A. Doucette-Frederickson Image 1 of / 32 Caption Close Ancient remains of gigantic shark found near Fort Worth, Texas 1 / 32 Back to Gallery

Outside Fort Worth, scientists unearthed the remains of massive creature not commonly associated with the North Texas plains: a mega shark.

Researchers from the University of Oklahoma announced the discovery Wednesday in the scientific journal Plos One with an article titled "A Gigantic Shark from the Lower Cretaceous Duck Creek Formation of Texas."

"These specimens are important because they represent some of the largest published lamniform shark vertebrae from the Early Cretaceous of North America."

Lamniform is a common family of sharks that includes the Great White—but this sharks seems almost twice as large as the kin of Jaws. It was identified based on three fossilized vertebrae, which give researchers a good estimate of the shark's length—they say about 20 feet long at minimum.

But the exact species of the shark is unclear. Researchers believe it's leptostyrax macrorhiza, of which larger specimens have been unearthed in Kansas.

The shark lived about 140 million years ago, when almost all of Texas was covered in a shallow sea or muddy swamps and the air was warmer than it is today. Tiny shelled sea creatures and great aquatic predators milled about the vast waters of the Lone Star State.

It was a time of greenhouse climate, when high global temperatures melted most polar ice. At the sime time, the slow birth of the Rocky Mountains in North America pushed down the earth across much of the continent.

Add those together and you have oceans in Texas.

But the Texas shark rattles researchers' notions of those super ancient seas, where giant lizard-like creatures were previously thought the sole and dominant predator of the seas. Now they know there were at least two mammoth monsters that swam through Texas in those days.

The discovery also reinforces the notion that sharks, especially lamniform sharks, are some of the most ancient large animals of modern times.