Something cool came in the mail today: a fossil tooth of a great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias. The root is a bit eroded, but the enamel-covered crown is in great shape, and it’s almost exactly the same size as my cast tooth from a modern great white. I got this for a couple of reasons.

Western University of Health Sciences

Matt Wedel

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image-title="Fossil great white tooth 1 – labial side in hand"
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Cast (white) and fossil (gray) great white shark teeth, lingual (tongue)
sides.
:::

Something cool came in the mail today: a fossil tooth of a great white
shark, *Carcharodon carcharias*. The root is a bit eroded, but the
enamel-covered crown is in great shape, and it's almost exactly the same
size as my cast tooth from a modern great white.

::: {#attachment_20406 .wp-caption .aligncenter shortcode="caption" style="width: 1034px"}
[![](https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/fossil-great-white-tooth-2-lingual-side-in-hand.jpg?w=480){.wp-image-20406
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image-title="Fossil great white tooth 2 – lingual side in hand"
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The labial (outer or lip-facing) sides of the same teeth.
:::

I got this for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted a real great white
shark tooth to show people alongside my megalodon tooth (for which see
the [previous
post](https://svpow.com/2022/11/05/matts-first-megalodon-tooth/)).
Extant great whites are quite rightly protected, and their teeth are
outside my price range when they are available at all. Fortunately there
are zillions of fossil great white teeth to be had.

Also, the cast great white tooth has been kind of a disappointment. It's
so white that it's actually a letdown, visually. Tactilely it's great,
with all kinds of subtle features on the crown especially, but those
features are almost impossible to see or photograph. In the photo above,
you can make out some of the long, smooth wrinkles in the enamel of the
cast tooth, but the median ridge, which is dead obvious on the fossil
tooth, only shows up under very low-angle lighting on the cast. The
fossil tooth is just a more interesting and more informative specimen,
material and origin aside. Now that I have it, I might try either
staining or painting the cast tooth, to see if I can rehabilitate it as
a visual object.

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image-title="Fossil great white tooth 3 – lateral view"
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sizes="(max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px"}](https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/fossil-great-white-tooth-3-lateral-view.jpg)

This fossil tooth is also noticeably thicker than the cast tooth. I
don't know if that's serial, individual, population, or evolutionary
variation. In the [last
post](https://svpow.com/2022/11/05/matts-first-megalodon-tooth/) I
contrasted the proportional thinness of the cast tooth with the
robustness of the megalodon tooth; this fossil tooth might fare a little
better if subjected to the same comparison. I should have thought to do
that when I was taking these photos.

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image-title="Fossil great white tooth 4 – megalodon comparison"
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medium-file="https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/fossil-great-white-tooth-4-megalodon-comparison.jpg?w=300"
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sizes="(max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px"}](https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/fossil-great-white-tooth-4-megalodon-comparison.jpg)

Speaking of comparisons, here's megalodon to remind everyone who's boss.
There's no scale bar here, but the cast great white tooth is 65mm from
the tip of the crown to the tip of the longer root, and the meg tooth is
155mm between the same points.

Now I have a gleam in my eye of assembling a couple of sets of fossil
teeth: one to illustrate the evolution of the modern great white from
its less-serrated ancestors, like [this
diagram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_white_shark#/media/File:Evolution_of_the_great_white_shark.jpg)
from the great white Wikipedia page, and one to illustrate the evolution
of megalodon from its side-cusped ancestors, like [this
diagram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Otodus_evolution.webp) from
the megalodon page --- presuming that current hypotheses for the two
lineages are accurate. If I ever get either set done, I'm sure I'll yap
about it here.


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Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Shark week 2: great white teeth redux