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Life

Shark versus whale, 4 million years BC

By Ewen Callaway

5 May 2009

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

A great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, feeds on a whale carcass at Seal Island, False Bay, South Africa

(Image: Chris And Monique Fallows / Apex Images Cc / OSF / Photolibrary)

Palaeontologists have discovered a fossilised great white shark tooth lodged in a four-million-year-old whale mandible bone – a first.

A team led by , of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, unearthed the unique specimen in southern Peru’s Pisco Formation, which during the Pliocene, the period around 2 to 5 million years ago, was an ocean.

But did the shark kill the whale, or merely scavenge its corpse? Find out in our gallery

Journal reference: ,

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