90% of sharks mysteriously wiped out nearly 20 million years ago: researchers
An extinction event about 19 million years ago decimated shark populations by up to 90%, researchers say. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, Yale University oceanographer and paleontologist Elizabeth Sibert and Leah Rubin, then an undergraduate student at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor , Maine, wrote that shark populations have still not recovered from the abrupt die-off. By studying shark teeth and other marine microfossils buried in deep-sea Pacific sediment, the pair reportedly found that current shark diversity was just a "small remnant of a much larger ar...