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A monstrous shark, hunter whale, great white, or even a bus-sized megalodon, once roamed the waters of northern Australia during the Cretaceous period.
Researchers studying giant vertebrae discovered near Darwin have identified the creature as the earliest known mega-predator of the modern shark lineage.
It lived an astonishing 15 million years earlier than any previously found giant shark.
This ancestor of today’s 6-meter (20-foot) great white shark was thought to be about 8 meters (26 feet) long, according to a paper published in. communication biology,
“Cardabiodontids were ancient, mega-predatory sharks that are very common from the late cretaceous“After 100 million years ago,” said Benjamin Care, senior curator of paleontology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History and one of the study’s authors. “But this has pushed back the envelope on when we were going to find absolutely giant cardabiodontids.”
The history of sharks goes back 400 million years, but Lamniformes, ancestors of today’s great white sharks, appear in the fossil record 135 million years ago. They were small at the time – perhaps only a meter in length – which suggests that lamniforms had become giant as early as 115 million years ago, which was unexpected to researchers.
Vertebrates found near the beach darwin In the far north of Australia, the soil once covered the bottom of an ancient ocean that extended from Gondwana – now Australia – to Laurasia, which is now EuropeIt is an area rich in fossil evidence of prehistoric marine life, with long-necked plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs among the creatures discovered so far,
Kear said the five vertebrae that sparked the search to estimate the size of their mega-shark owners were not a recent discovery, but an old one that had been somewhat ignored. The fossils, discovered in the late 1980s and 1990s, were 12 centimeters (4.7 in) long and had been stored in a museum for years.
When studying ancient sharks, the vertebrae are prizes for paleontologists. Sharks’ skeletons are made not of bone but cartilage, and their fossil record is mostly made up of teeth, which sharks shed throughout their lives.
“The importance of vertebrae is that they give us clues about shape,” Kear said. “If you’re trying to measure it by teeth, it’s difficult. Are the teeth big and the bodies small? Are they big teeth with big bodies?”
![The 115 million year old vertebra of a giant Darwin's lamniform shark was studied by? [international, not just Australian] Researchers who used multiple data points to calculate the mega-predators' enormous size. (Benjamin Carew/Swedish Museum of Natural History, via AP)](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/stsp/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img/https://www.thelocalreport.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Australia_Mega_Predator_Sharks_58615.jpg)
Scientists have used mathematical formulas to estimate the size of extinct sharks such as Megalodon, which was a giant predator that arrived later and could reach 17 meters (56 feet) in length, Care said. But the rarity of the vertebrae means questions about the size of ancient sharks are difficult to answer, he said.
The international research team spent years testing different ways of estimating the size of Darwin’s cardabiodontids using fisheries data, CT scan And mathematical models, Carey said. Eventually, they arrived at a tentative picture of the predator’s size and shape.
“It would have looked for all the world like a modern, giant shark, because that’s the beauty of it,” Kear said. “This is a body model that has worked for 115 million years, like an evolutionary success story.”
The Darwin shark study shows that modern sharks rose to the top of prehistoric food chains early in their adaptive evolution, the researchers said. Now, Kear said, scientists can look for similar environments in others around the world.
“They may have been around before,” he said. “This thing had ancestors.”
Studying such ancient ecosystems can help researchers understand how today’s species might respond to environmental change, Kear said.
“This is where our modern world begins,” he said. “By looking at what has happened during past changes in climate and biodiversity, we can get a better idea of what may happen next.”