Mysterious Event Determined 90 Percent of Shark Variety 19 Million Years Ago, New Study Finds

A new study found that one mysterious event nearly 19 million years ago wiped out almost all sharks.

Scientists who follow this new study say that studying shark teeth hidden deep in the deep sea reveals that the current diversity of sharks is only a small remnant of the largest species that existed at that time.

They say that this unprecedented catastrophic sea level has caused the shark diversity to decline by more than 70 percent and has almost completely disappeared.

The cause of the event remains a mystery, scientists said.

Investigators say the single event led to the apparent extinction of sharks in open sea habitats, declining in size by about 90 percent.

They added that the sudden collapse was independent of any known weather event in the world.

According to a study report published in the journal Science, modern shark species began to vary between two and five million years after the near extinction, but they represent only a fraction of what the sharks once were.

The Life Science report quoted Elizabeth Sibert, a fellow graduate of Yale University’s Institute for Biospheric Studies and co-author of the study, as saying,

“Sharks have been around for 400 million years; the extinction of many people is over. ”

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Research into ichthyolites, the smallest shark fossil, found on many types of mounds but small and rare compared to other microfossils, has led to the discovery, Sibert told Live Science.

While scientists in the 1970s and 80s studied ichthyolites, only a handful of researchers tested themselves before Sibert, who investigated them for doctoral degrees, who graduated in 2016.

“A lot of what I did in my first job as a scientist was to find out how we could work with these fossils, what kinds of questions we could ask ourselves,” Sibert said.

In their new study, Sibert and Leah Rubin, a co-author who was a graduate student at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine during the study, studied sediment cores extracted many years ago by deep-sea drilling projects from two different sites: one in the middle of the North Pacific, and another in the middle of the South Pacific.

“We have chosen those areas mainly because they are farther away from the earth and are farther away from any influences of changing sea cycles or ocean currents,” Sibert said.

Rubin, who is now a doctoral student at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, said the worst case scenario for this decline in shark diversity is the most surprising aspect of the study and for them.

A million-dollar question, Rubin says, is what is causing that?

This paper is just the beginning, says Sibert, and he hopes that it will be a truly exciting decade to find out more about what happened at that time that led to the extinction of sharks.

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