Fossil Shark Gallery - Prehistoric Shark Fossil Facts and Information - Fossil Shark Teeth from many different types of sharks.

Prehistoric Shark Gallery
Information, Facts, and History about Prehistoric Sharks and Fossil Shark Teeth!

About Sharks
What are sharks? Shark facts, characteristics, and shark information

What are sharks? Sharks are fish. They are classified as cartilaginous fish, or chondrichthyes. This means sharks do not have a hard skeleton, like us, instead their skeleton is made of a dense cartilage (similar to what the tip of your nose and ears are made of). The chondrichthyes class not only includes sharks, but also skates, rays, and chimaeras as they also have a cartilaginous skeleton.

Specifically, sharks, skates, and rays belong to the Elasmobranchii subclass. This subclass contains 8 extant orders, which in itself contains over 600 species. The following shark pictures show the physical characteristics of a shark.


Figure 1: This shark picture shows the main body features of a shark. This picture was taken at Wolf Island, in the Galapagos during one of my dive trips.


Figure 2: This shark picture shows detailed structures on the head of a shark, plus claspers, which are not present in the first picture. This picture was taken at the North Shore in Hawaii during a shark cage excursion. (note: the spiracle in this image is actually closer to the eye. I need to fix the diagram)

Note that each shark order has a slightly different anatomy. Some orders have fin spines, while others don't. Some have one dorsal fin, while other orders have two. The number of gill slits ranges from 5 to 7 depending on the order, etc...

Most of the terminology in the diagrams are self explanatory. Some shark terms that may be unfamiliar include the spiracles and the claspers. Claspers are found on male sharks. They are used to hold onto the female while mating (Hey, they don't have hands!). The spiracles are a bit more complicated. A spiracle is a hole behind the eye that leads to the mouth. When tracing the evolution, it use to be a gill in jawless fish. When jaws developed, the jaw bones isolated this gill slit from the rest, and could no longer be used. A remnant hole from this unused gill still remains in sharks. It's kind of like a tail bone on a person, we don't have a tail, but still have a little bone there.

Types of Shark Fossils

This article is a good introduction to the types of shark fossils that may be found. There is more than just fossil shark teeth!

Browse the Fossil Shark Genera

Learn all about each type of prehistoric shark
Each link has information about the prehistoric shark, diagrams, terminology, sample fossils, fossil hunting locations, past fossil hunting trips, and more.