New species of Jurassic-age Hybodont Shark discovered from Rajasthan's Jaisalmer


PTI | New Delhi | Updated: 15-09-2021 20:14 IST | Created: 15-09-2021 20:14 IST
New species of Jurassic-age Hybodont Shark discovered from Rajasthan's Jaisalmer
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Teeth of new species of Hybodont Shark of Jurassic age have been reported for the first time from Jaisalmer by a team of officers from the Geological Survey of India (GSI), the government on Wednesday said.

This discovery marks an important milestone in the study of Jurassic vertebrate fossils in the Jaisalmer region of Rajasthan, and it opens a new window for further research in the domain of vertebrate fossils.

''In a rare discovery, teeth of new species of Hybodont Shark of Jurassic age have been reported for the first time from Jaisalmer by a team of officers comprising Krishna Kumar, Pragya Pandey, Triparna Ghosh and Debasish Bhattacharya from the Geological Survey of India (GSI), western region, Jaipur,'' the mines ministry said in a statement.

This finding has been published in Historical Biology, a Journal of Palaeontology of International repute, in its August 2021, or 4th, issue, the statement said.

Krishna Kumar, senior geologist (palaeontology division), western region, said Hybodont Sharks have been reported for the first time from the Jurassic rocks (between 160 and 168 million years old) of the Jaisalmer region of Rajasthan. Hybodonts, an extinct group of sharks, was a dominant group of fishes in both marine and fluvial environments during the Triassic and early Jurassic times.

However, Hybodont Sharks started to decline in marine environments from the Middle Jurassic onwards until they formed a relatively minor component of open-marine shark assemblages.

Hybodonts finally became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous time 65 million years ago.

Significantly, the newly discovered crushing teeth from Jaisalmer represent a new species named by the research team as Strophodusjaisalmerensis. The genus Strophodus has been identified for the first time from the Indian subcontinent and is only the third such record from Asia, the other two being from Japan and Thailand.

The new species has recently been included in the Shark references.com, an international platform operating in association with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Species Survival Commission, and Germany.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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