Looks like “Jaws” can get an origin story.
Paleontologists discovered fossils of an ancient “shark” species now known to have swam the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago during the Paleozoic period, EurekAlert reported.
The new species of prehistoric predators — known as acanthodians — was discovered in the Guizhou province of southwest China and was named Fanjingshania after one of the country’s UNESCO world heritage sites.
“This is the oldest jawed fish with known anatomy,” said professor Zhu Min from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Fanjingshania was found to predate the previously believed oldest acanthodian by 15 million years.
“The new data allowed us to place Fanjingshania in the phylogenetic tree of early vertebrates and gain much needed information about the evolutionary steps leading to the origin of important vertebrate adaptations such as jaws, sensory systems and paired appendages,” Min added.
Their anatomy differs from the modern sharks of today. The “bizarre” Fanjingshania is comprised of a bony “armor” and multiple fin spines that are distinctly different than modern sharks and other marine life, according to the outlet.
Discovering Fanjingshania also leads researchers to believe that there were many groupings of vertebrate creatures swimming the world’s waters prior to the so-called “age of fishes” that began around 420 million years ago.
“This level of hard tissue modification is unprecedented in chondrichthyans, a group that includes modern cartilaginous fish and their extinct ancestors,” said lead author Dr. Plamen Andreev, a researcher at Qujing Normal University.
“It speaks about greater than currently understood developmental plasticity of the mineralized skeleton at the onset of jawed fish diversification.”