""Buzzsaw" shark? Nature stranger than fiction..." Topic

link

Well, that's my name for it.

What a bizarre physiology, and completely outside of what we typically imagine, even in our most ridiculous fantasy/kaiju monsters. Amazing creature (and I'm glad it's not around any more! The sea gives me the willies enough as it is.)

It probebly wasn't that great since no animals alive to day have those kinda jaws, if something works you usualy see alot of it.

Dinosaurs and Mammals have lots of simularties, you had dinosaurs that looked alot like wolves, even amphibians that looked alot like wolves, the wolf seem to have a "perfect" from or atleast ideal, time and time again we see the same type of body plan showing up in very diffrent clads of animals.

You've had reptile dolphins shark dolphins croccodile dolphins ect.

If this was a great way of killing and eating stuff, we would either see living animals with that kinda jaw, or lots of extinct animals that had them.

well it died out so it must not have worked very well.

Glad it's gone!

I've seen actual specimens of Helicoprion. Based on their tooth whorls, they did not seem that large…not that I would want to be swimming around them!

Fox news posting something about fossils! What is the world coming to!

There is another thing about Evolution, there is an anology about early human powered flight.

If you look at the first 10-20 years of aviation, you see theise fantastic planes, 2-3-6 wings, strange forms ect. then by the mid 20s we started to get the whole airodymaic stuff, and planes have since got kinda "boring"

Same thing happend with evolution in the early days, if you look at the cambrian you had thiese trange creatures strange fish ect. then after a while evoution kinda started to get it, and you start to se more standard "boring" forms show up.

Thos this kinda jaw was probebly an evolutionary dead end, early in shark evolution.

There is a misconception that the extinction of Helicoprion must have had something to do with the design of it's mouth. That's not necessarily the case.

For instance, maybe the Helicoprion was not good at coping with the changing salinity levels of the ancient Triassic oceans. That could have made it an evolutionary "dead-end", despite the efficiency of it's method of chewing/biting.

If there was no increase in fitness of the "buzz saw" style mouth, then there would have been no adaption to it in the first place. According to Wiki they were around for 60 million years, including the P-T exctinction. Not too shabby.