Usually, when listing the predatory fish of the ocean, people would put sharks at the top. Scientists have recently found fossils of this shark’s predecessor fish. The researcher thinks this fossil described the time several hundred thousand years ago.
The ancient type of shark in the world is the acanthodians. They had spines all over their bodies. They had a pair of fins with armor plates cut into their bodies.
Chinese scientists never thought they would find fossils of ancient sharks. They estimate the body of the acanthodian shark to be about 15 million years old. It is probably the oldest jawed fish in the world.
Their paper mentions the fossil of an ancient shark called Fanjingshania. It is said that the tissues and bones of present-day jawed fish show considerable differences between prehistoric sharks.
Now the bone formation process of Acanthodian sharks is not similar to that of modern sharks. The primitive bone structure was similar to that of acanthodian sharks.
During the Age of Fish, which began 420 million years ago, the structure of the backbone of marine fish began to change. This primitive shark fossil describes a 420-million-year-old spinal cord.
Because the backbone of the shark in the present time has no similarity with the backbone of that time, Professor Zhu Min, a scientist at the Chinese Academy, said that this acanthodian shark is the oldest of the jawed fishes they have studied.
Scientists will now, step by step, uncover information about how the structure of the shark’s jaws, sensor systems, and other body parts have changed over time.
Researchers are trying to figure out how long it took and what process the evolution from jawed to jawless fish took.