Mention the ocean, and it’s hard not to think of jaws. The deep waters contain many tooth-lined mouths: the bear-trap maws of sharks and dolphins, the slack lips of shoaling and reef fish, the baleen-filter gape of enormous whales. Jawed fish eventually crawled out of the seas millions of years ago and gave rise to the jawboning vertebrates we are today. But when did such an evolutionary innovation arise? A pair of fossil beds discovered in Southern China suggest that the answer may lie tens of millions of years deeper…
Fossilized Fish Reveal Earliest Known Prequel of ‘Jaws’
