Ancient Mega-Shark Remains Stun Scientists in Australia
So, imagine walking along a beach in northern Australia and stumbling across something that completely rewrites what we thought we knew about prehistoric sharks. That’s exactly what happened near Darwin, where a set of enormous, fossilised shark vertebrae was uncovered—remains so big that experts immediately knew they were looking at a predator far larger than most sharks we know today.
These fossils, about 115 million years old, came from an ancient lamniform shark, the same broad family that includes today’s great whites and makos. At first glance, the vertebrae looked familiar, but the size told a very different story. While modern great white vertebrae usually measure around 8cm across, the ones discovered near Darwin exceeded 12cm. That single detail completely changed the scale of the creature. Based on comparisons with modern sharks—especially well-studied great whites—scientists estimate this prehistoric shark stretched between six and eight metres long and weighed well over three tonnes. Just to put that into perspective, that’s larger than most great whites alive today.
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Researchers believe these remains belonged to a now-extinct family of massive predatory sharks known as the Cardabiodontidae. These giants patrolled Earth’s oceans roughly 100 million years ago, but the Darwin fossils threw scientists a curveball: they predate all previously known cardabiodontids by about 15 million years. In other words, sharks were experimenting with gigantic body sizes far earlier in their evolutionary history than anyone realised.
The fossils came from rock formations along the southern edge of the ancient Tethys Ocean, a place that once teemed with a rich marine ecosystem—plesiosaurs, early bony fish, and a variety of sharks. The vertebrae were beautifully preserved, showing thick calcified rims and fine concentric ridges, allowing researchers to confidently identify their lineage. And because these vertebrae likely came from the middle of the shark’s body, the size estimates are considered conservative. The animal may have been even larger than current calculations suggest.
Scientists used thousands of measurements from living sharks to model the fossil’s true scale, comparing vertebra diameters, body length and mass. Across all reasonable models, the results consistently landed in that seven-to-eight-metre range, painting a picture of a sleek, powerful, early apex predator cruising ancient Australian waters. It likely hunted fish and marine reptiles, sharing the seas with plesiosaurs and other Cretaceous giants.
What makes this discovery especially exciting is what it reveals about shark evolution. Giant lamniforms weren’t a late-Cretaceous development after all—they’d already emerged tens of millions of years earlier. Combined with growing evidence of warm-blooded traits and advanced hunting adaptations in early sharks, this find shows just how sophisticated these predators were long before the age of megatooth sharks.
In short, a handful of vertebrae washed up on a beach has opened an entirely new window into the past, revealing a mega-shark that ruled the seas long before the ocean’s most famous predators ever appeared.
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