Recent discoveries of teeth and a fin spine of 330-million-year-old fossil sharks by Phoebe Larkin and Emma Glanville of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Burren National Park and local guide Cormac McGinley of Cormac’s Coast, provide the first records of strange ancient fossil sharks from the Burren, County Clare and Donegal, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The specimens were identified by a team of paleontologists including Dr. Eamon Doyle of the Burren and Cliffs of Moher UNESCO Global Geopark and his colleagues Dr. Wayne Itano of Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado, USA and Dr. Aodh\u00e1n \u00d3 Gog\u00e1in of the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin and their work has recently been published in the Irish Journal of Earth Sciences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Burren teeth have been identified as Psephodus magnus, <\/em>a type of shark that had flat robust dental plates for crushing prey such as shellfish, rather than the typical pointed or bladed teeth we usually associate with sharks. The teeth are 30mm long and 20mm wide and would have been part of a dental pavement of multiple interlocking plates of varying sizes in the mouth of the shark. There are few modern relatives of these fish, but they are distantly related to the modern deep sea ratfish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n