![]() ![]() Smithsonian scientists were even pretty sure that the whorl belonged deep in the shark’s throat. Since these early postulations, no one has been able to perfectly position the more than two-foot-wide spiral of knife-like tips. Throughout the early 1900s an American geologist, Charles Rochester Eastman, made the case that it was instead a defense structure on the creature’s back. Russian geologist Alexander Karpinsky discovered the first Helicoprion in 1899 in Russia-he imagined the whorl as a fused-together coil of teeth that curled up over the shark’s snout. The strange tooth “whorl” belonged to the Helicoprion genus, the “buzz sharks” (a moniker Troll introduced in 2012). The bizarre beasts swam Earth’s waters some 270 million years ago, persisting for about 10 million years. ![]() Little did Troll know, this rocky jaw would consume his mind over the next 20 years, just as it had done with scientists before him. In reality, his guide explained, the fossilized spiral was the jaw of an ancient shark. “It was a beautiful whorl… I thought it was a big snail,” he says now, recollecting the moment when he visited the museum for a book he was working on. Paleo-artist Ray Troll’s obsession began way back in 1993, when he spotted what he calls a “strange doorstop” in the basement of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |