A prehistoric mystery. A fossil so mesmerizing that it boggled the
minds of scientists for more than a century--until a motley crew of
modern day shark fanatics decided to try to bring the monster-predator
back to life.
In 1993, Alaskan artist and paleo-shark enthusiast Ray Troll stumbled
upon the weirdest fossil he had ever seen--a platter-sized spiral of
tightly wound shark teeth. This chance encounter in the basement of the
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County sparked Troll's obsession
with Helicoprion, a mysterious monster from deep time.
In 2010, tattooed undergraduate student and returning Iraq War veteran
Jesse Pruitt became seriously smitten with a Helicoprion fossil in a
museum basement in Idaho. These two bizarre-shark disciples found each
other, and an unconventional band of collaborators grew serendipitously
around them, determined to solve the puzzle of the mysterious tooth
whorl once and for all.
Helicoprion was a Paleozoic chondrichthyan about the size of a modern
great white shark, with a circular saw of teeth centered in its lower
jaw--a feature unseen in the shark world before or since. For some ten
million years, long before the Age of Dinosaurs, Helicoprion patrolled
the shallow seas around the supercontinent Pangaea as the apex predator
of its time.
Just a few tumultuous years after Pruitt and Troll met, imagination,
passion, scientific process, and state-of-the-art technology merged into
an unstoppable force that reanimated the remarkable creature--and made
important new discoveries.
In this groundbreaking book, Susan Ewing reveals these revolutionary
insights into what Helicoprion looked like and how the tooth whorl
functioned--pushing this dazzling and awe-inspiring beast into the
spotlight of modern science.
