Researchers name extinct shark after retired museum official

Two researchers, David Cicimurri, curator of natural history at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, and Jun Ebersole, director of collections at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama, have honoured LSU Museum of Natural Science’s Vertebrate Paleontology, or VP, Collections Manager Suyin Ting, who retired on December 23, 2021, by naming a shark after her.

Ting’s namesake, the Carcharhinus tingae, is a shark that lived 40 million years ago. According to AL.com, “Ebersole said he’s published papers in scientific journals describing more than 12 new species previously unknown to science, mostly based on fossils found in and around Alabama.”

The Carcharhinus tingae, is “in the same genus as the modern bull sharks and dusky sharks, but its teeth were most similar to the requiem shark or the grey reef shark.”

Cicimurri and Ebersole were going through the collections at the Museum of Natural Science at LSU, Baton Rouge, because they were preparing a chapter for the as-yet-unpublished book Vertebrate Fossils of Louisiana. According to a news release by LSU, the book project was initially organised by the late Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology Judith Shiebut, before she passed away in 2020.

They discovered teeth that had lain in the vertebrate palaeontology collection unmarked, but they were unique and did not match any known fossil or modern shark species. In their two-day research expedition at LSU in 2020, they photographed and identified many other fish fossils as well.

They spent months comparing the unique teeth to “hundreds of other fossil and modern shark species” to show that the new teeth belonged to a previously unknown species.

The results of their study were published last week in the journal Cainozoic Research, AL.com reports.

“I am very honored to be recognized by my peers for my work,” Ting said. She came to LSU as a visiting scholar from China in 1980 and again in 1988. She received her PhD from LSU in 1995, the same year she started working at the LSU Museum of Natural Science under her PhD advisor, Judith Schiebout.

“This honor is nice, but more important is [Cicimurri and Ebersole’s] contribution to the LSU Vertebrate Paleontology collection. It is huge,” Ting said. “I would like to thank them for their hard work.”

The LSU museum doesn’t have a fossil fish specialist, and Cicimurri and Ebersole were able to identify much of the material previously labeled “fish.”

AP notes that “because shark skeletons are made of cartilage rather than bone, their teeth are often the only fossils available.”

“By examining the teeth of living sharks, we were able to determine that the fossil species was closely related to modern Requiem Sharks, so we used jaws of modern species to reconstruct how the teeth were arranged in the mouth of the extinct species,” Cicimurri said.

Cicimurri and Ebersole point out that the Carcharhinus tingae teeth have only been found in Louisiana so far, where AP notes they are “relatively common” – proof that these sharks lived in an ancient ocean that used to be in place of what is now Louisiana.

THUMBNAIL IMAGE: Fossil Carcharhinus tingae teeth. (Jun Ebersole, McWane Science Center/Birmingham, Alabama)

HEADLINE IMAGE: Underwater photograph of a tiger shark, a species of requiem shark, in the Bahamas. (Wikimedia Commons/ Albert Kok)