The food chain.

There have been a lot of trip reports posted about shark teeth at this site. But little mention has been made about another common fossil shark find. I'm talking about vertebrates. We've all seen them while collecting. And while most everyone picks them up, they usually get lost in the bottom of the fossil box. Most shark reference books have little information on vertebrates. That's because most shark vertebrates look the same. The great white sharks have a distinctive shape. But the rest are mostly generic. While collecting in the Chandler Bridge Formation in 2001 I came across an associated vertebrate column of a shark. Unfortunately, there were no teeth. The head section had been removed during excavation of a drainage ditch, leaving only the posterior section. The living shark would have been around 5 to 5 and a half feet long. Some of the vertebrates had shark tooth marks from feeding. It seems that everything ends up on the food chain eventually.