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-fish freak 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 shark from deep time.
In 2010, tattooed amateur strongman and returning Iraq War veteran Jesse
Pruitt was also severely smitten by 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 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
