Giant Prehistoric Shark Teeth Discovered In The Desert

Several giant teeth from an extinct prehistoric megalodon shark have been found in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and a top expert has said that despite treasure hunters pillaging the area, the South American country still has “one of the largest scientific collections of megalodon teeth in the world.”

The discovery of the giant teeth belonging to the prehistoric shark that is believed to have lived between 23 million and 2 million years ago took place in the Bahia Inglesa Formation, located in the Atacama Desert near the Pacific coast of northern Chile.

The megalodon — whose name means big teeth — was “by far the largest shark of all time, a super predator whose length is estimated to be between 16 and 20 meters (52 and 66 feet) long,” said Pablo Quilodran executive director of the Atacama Paleontology and Natural History Research and Advancement Corp.

“In the Atacama region, there are extraordinary fossil deposits, and in the case of the coast, there are remains of marine vertebrates from about 8 million years ago (the Neogene period).”

Extensive mining operations and looting by treasure hunters had led to possibly hundreds of teeth from megalodons and other prehistoric artifacts being sold on the black market, said Quilodran.

“Although in Chile fossils are protected by law, for many years one of the most spectacular localities, the Bahia Inglesa Formation, was the victim of destruction by deregulated mining operations and from looting by illegal fossil hunters,” he said.

On a more positive note, he said some looted artifacts have been returned to Chile in recent years, allowing it to build the world’s most impressive collection.

“According to informal counts, we know that hundreds of megalodon teeth were found and sold on the international market. Some of them were returned to the Paleontological Museum of the city of Caldera and the Chilean National Museum of Natural History.

“With this, we undoubtedly have one of the largest scientific collections of megalodon teeth in the world.”

How is it teeth from a marine animal were found in the middle of a desert?

“Because the sea level has changed over millions of years (marine transgression and regression),” the expert said. “This is visible not only in the abundant marine fossils found in sediments today but also in the geomorphology of this part of the desert, where we can see natural esplanades, which are ancient marine terraces that testify to these different sea levels.

“In short, the sea has receded, but the ground has also risen as a result of earthquakes and subduction of plates, phenomena that we Chileans know and experience so well.”

Such finds are nothing new; English naturalist and evolution theorist Charles Darwin reported having found some megalodon teeth during his trip to Chile in 1835, Quilodran said, while recent discoveries had put the total number of different shark species found in the area to 25.

“In the case of sharks, it is not only megalodon; we recently found a new sawshark record for the area, which adds up to more than 25 different species of shark that have been found in the sector.”

A lot of these discoveries were apparently due to sheer luck. “Many of these findings are fortuitous and did not respond to systematic scientific activity,” Quilodran said.

But future discoveries will likely be subject to more rigorous planning, due to the recent creation of the Atacama Paleontology and Natural History Research and Advancement Corp.

The implications of the discoveries of megalodon teeth in the Atacama Desert are huge for science, with Quilodran saying: “The unusual abundance of megalodon remains in this part of the desert opens up expectations for new knowledge about many aspects of ancient life regarding this remarkable species of shark.

“For example, what and how did it eat? New estimates of body size, growth speed, whether it was solitary or gregarious, internal temperature and paleo-environmental data, are among many other topics that may be addressed.

“For its part, the Bahia Inglesa site also has an abundance of remains of bony fish, marine mammals, birds and even reptiles, and all the research potential to understand the evolution of a great diversity of different lineages of marine vertebrates is gigantic.”

The recently discovered megalodon teeth will eventually end up in a museum, where the public will be able to view them.

Might the megalodon still exist? No, Quilodran says: “The megalodon became extinct due to possible climatic changes around 2 million years ago.”

Still, it “is always possible to find new species and animals that have gone unnoticed by science, but at 16 meters [52 feet] long, it would be very difficult to have not detected it,” he said.

Despite megalodon being the largest shark of all time, it’s possible an even larger predator of another species preyed on it.

“Megalodon was a super-predator that was possible at the top of the food chain … however, teeth from another marine vertebrate have been found, this time a super-predatory cetacean that could rival this shark,” Quilodran said. “This cetacean, a relative of sperm whales, is called Leviathan and its fossils have also been found on the Atacama coast.”

Oldest Human Footprint in Americas May Be This 15,600-Year-Old Mark in Chile

The earliest human footprint on record in the Americas wasn’t found in Canada, the United States or even Mexico; it was found much farther south, in Chile, and it dates to an astonishing 15,600 years ago, a new study finds.

The finding sheds light on when humans first reached the Americas, likely by traveling across the Bering Strait land bridge in the midst of the last ice age.

This 10.2-inch-long (26 centimeters) print might even be evidence of pre-Clovis people in South America, the group that came before the Clovis, which are known for their distinctive spearheads, the researchers said.

The find suggests that pre-Clovis people were in northern Patagonia (a region of South America) for some time, as the footprint is older than archaeological evidence from Chile’s Monte Verde, a site about 60 miles (100 kilometers) south containing artifacts that are at least 14,500 years old.

Vertebrate paleontologist Leonora Salvadores discovered the footprint in December 2021, when she was an undergraduate student at the Austral University of Chile.

At the time, Salvadores and her fellow students were investigating a well-known archaeological site known as Pilauco, which is about 500 miles (820 km) south of Santiago, Chile.

However, it took years for study lead researcher and paleontologist Karen Moreno and study lead investigator and geologist Mario Pino, both at the Austral University of Chile, to verify that the print was human, radiocarbon date it (they tested six different organic remnants found at that layer to be sure) and determine how it was made by a barefoot adult.

Part of these tests involved walking through similar sediment to see what kinds of tracks got left behind. These experiments revealed that the ancient human likely weighed about 155 lbs. (70 kilograms) and that the soil was quite wet and sticky when the print was made.

It appears that a clump of this sticky dirt clung to the person’s toes and then fell into the print when the foot was lifted, as the image below suggests.

The footprint is classified as a type called Hominipes modernus, a footprint usually made by Homo sapiens, the researchers said. (Just like species, trace fossils, such as footprints, receive scientific names.) Previous excavations at the site revealed other late Pleistocene fossils, including the bones of elephant relatives, llama relatives and ancient horses, as well as rocks that humans may have used as tools, the researchers said.

The study “adds to a growing body of fossil and archaeological evidence suggesting that humans dispersed throughout the Americas earlier than many people have previously thought,” said Kevin Hatala, an assistant professor of biology at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the study.

This find comes a mere year after the discovery of the oldest known human footprints in North America, which date to 13,000 years ago, Hatala noted.

It would be nice to have more data from the Chile site — “more footprints, more artifacts, more skeletal material and so on,” Hatala told  in an email.

“But unfortunately, the fossil and archaeological records are never as generous as we’d like! With just a single human footprint to work with, the authors extracted as much information as they could. When we look at this evidence in the context of other data, it makes a strong case for the antiquity of [the] human presence in Patagonia.”

The footprint is now preserved in a glass box and is housed at the recently established Pleistocene Museum in the city of Osorno, Chile.