This is Gulf Coast life.

I might.

Can I ever think for joining us?

Florida Gulf Coast University's water school officially launched on World Water Day in 2019.

It was March 22nd, and the school dedicated its building in late 2022.

The Water School brought together the Department of Ecology and Environmental Studies and the Department of Marine and Earth Sciences.

Since FGCU opened in 1997, it has added many departments and academic paths and lots of new professors and instructors.

At launch, there were about 100 instructors.

These days it's closer to 900 if you include part time and adjuncts.

I say all that because there was a time when I knew just about everyone here on campus, and now I'm constantly coming across people doing super interesting research right here on the same campus we broadcast from.

So today we're going to learn about some fascinating research on shark fossils being done by Doctor Harry Maisch.

He's an assistant professor of Earth science in the Department of Marine and Earth Sciences in the Water school at FGCU.

His work focuses on Cenozoic shark and fish paleontology, and from the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains of the United States.

We'll learn what those terms mean in just a second.

Doctor, welcome to the show.

It's good to meet you.

Thanks, Mike.

Senator, it's the modern era of sharks, but that still means it goes back 66 million years.

That's correct.

We're looking at the last 66 million years of time.

And sharks go back much further than that.

Correct.

True sharks, as we consider them, go back at least 300 million years, potentially more, depending on the fossil record.

Are they really older than trees?

Is that true?

You hear that?

But I want to confirm it with somebody who probably knows the correct answer.

Some of the early evidence of some of the ancestral sharks go back to goes back to before trees on planet Earth.

That's fascinating to me.

Studying how fossils have faced time.

Is that a simple way to put it?

Pretty much the laws of burial.

I like to summarize it as how things go from being once living to becoming buried and potentially fossilized, and then how they could be discovered later.

What things have happened since they were buried, because not everything that winds up in the ground is going to be found millions of years later.

That's correct.

And they're not always pristine.

Many fossils get broken up there.

Fragmentary things destroy them.

They're partially preserved.

So not everything's always perfect.

And that explains how fond of me that broken up into tiny pieces will become relevant later in this conversation, I believe.

Give us a brief overview of your background and like your academic areas of research.

So I grew up in northern new Jersey.

I went to Rutgers University for my degrees in geology and environmental science.

I always had an interest in fossils and marine life.

From there, I sort of carried those interests forward into a master's degree at Brooklyn College, where I studied a fossil shark assemblage that hadn't been reported before from central new Jersey.

Same interests again progressed forward.

I became a very avid scuba diver, and I carried on to pursue a PhD at the City University of New York, which is part of the Graduate Center facility in Manhattan, where I continued to work with paleontologists there.

And I described fossil megalodon teeth from off the coast of North Carolina that you have to find by scuba diving 40 miles offshore and 100 to 120ft of water.

Well-known spot, but had never been reported before.

So I tried to combine my interest in marine life fossils, in particular fossil sharks, with also my passion for diving.

And then those studies have sort of branched out from there and led me to FGCU megalodon or giant sharks, giant shark.

Okay.

I thought that was the case.

Do you remember finding your first fossil?

And when you did, did you know what fossils were or did you find something and then learn what fossils were?

Oh, that's a good question.

I do remember it.

I was six years old, standing in a creek in central new Jersey.

I went with family and friends, and I've always had an interest in fossils, dinosaurs, but also marine fossils.

I always had an interest in sharks for some reason, and it was a fossil shark tooth was my first fossil.

So this might be a weird question, but I'm kind of going out on a limb.

Did you have shark or dinosaur posters on your wall as a kid?

Were you that into it?

100%.

Okay, so I have it, right.

So when you went away to do your first degree in geology, was graduate school always something that was a foregone conclusion?

In other words, you know, if you were, you could you have imagined someday you'd be walking across campus with a bunch of fossils to talk at a university.

You know what I mean?

Like, was that always your path?

Not necessarily.

I wasn't 100% sure I was going to continue on for a graduate education when I finished.

When I was wrapping up my undergrad degree, I met actually an external faculty member who became a mentor and friend, colleague and friend, and that sort of pushed me down that path to continue on and to continue studying these unique fossils.

Is that Professor Martin Becker, who you named a fossil after?

That's Doctor Marty Becker.

That's him.

Yep.

Tell us a bit about him.

And then the fossil that you found.

If I got it right in Arkansas.

Yep.

So we have the same passion in fossil sharks.

He's more of a Cretaceous fossil shark expert, which is?

That's older.

Older than the Santa.

Okay, so before 66 million years.

And then I had more of an interest in the more recent stuff, you know, the larger teeth from megalodon and so on.

So we just hit it off right away.

We had the same interest, the same, you know, interest in being outdoors, being, you know, exploring field sites, fishing, diving and that sort of thing, and then just built a connection and started working together on research, going on field endeavors, field trips to look for new fossil sites and new fossils.

And then the species you mentioned is beccarii as its name.

It's a tiny tooth from a stingray, a fossil stingray.

It's an extinct species of stingray.

It was found in southwestern Arkansas.

So there was once an ocean in southwest Arkansas, and that animal dates to around 60 to 60, maybe 66 million years old.

It was just after basically the the extinction of the dinosaurs.

So I found the tooth.

It was by chance, I never.

Thought how tiny.

Two millimeters.

Two millimeters.

Give or take.

It was a whole tooth.

Whole tooth.

So one tooth.

I found multiple teeth, but they're small.

They're not big.

And I knew they were distinct because I couldn't find them in any of the literature.

I looked at any of the historical references, the books.

And then that took me onto a treasure hunt, looking for the old original reports of these things from the early 1900s, late 1800s, and looking for specimens in museums that would be similar.

One of them was found in new Jersey.

The others were found off the west coast of Africa.

So I had all this original material, and then I was able to compare the species from Arkansas, the tooth from Arkansas to those.

And it's distinct.

It's different.

That must have felt pretty good.

Yeah.

Never thought I'd do that.

Don't know if I'll ever do it again, but it was very interesting endeavor, to say the least.

You mentioned how, you know, you found a shark tooth in Arkansas, which is not an ocean these days.

Give us a picture of how much the landscape of North America and Florida in particular, has changed over geologic time.

Can you find marine fossils anywhere in North America, or just about anywhere?

There's a good chance you can find them.

In many places, the geology is not the same everywhere, so the age of the rocks is not the same.

Some places have had more mountain building events or more deformation of the rocks, so you might not get the same stuff everywhere.

But our North American tectonic plate.

Our continent has changed a lot over time.

Within the last 10 million years alone here in Florida, we've seen multiple changes of sea level, some of which would have submerged where we're at today and other times where the shoreline would be 50, 60, maybe more miles to the west because sea level was much lower.

So sea level change is definitely a very interesting topic to study, and it influences where fossils can be found and how those deposits form.

50 miles further into the Gulf would have been land point in deep history.

Florida.

Basically the peninsula Peninsula Florida doubles in size about 18 to 21,000 years ago.

That's called the Last Glacial Maximum, when sea level is at its lowest due to massive amounts of ice being stored on Earth, so sea level is lower and then land more land is exposed.

Fascinating.

So let's get into fossils.

You were showing me these things that you brought in, and you've got a shark jaw.

Is that a jaw?

Yep.

And we were talking about how they make lots of teeth over the course of their lives.

And what I asked you was, you know, you've got these big shark teeth and they're different colors.

Explain what conditions make for preservation, and then we'll explain why these shark teeth are different colors.

So preservation of fossil remains, of remains in general.

A lot of it has to do with rapid burial.

How durable the remain is in the first place.

Does the animal have a shell, a tooth, a bone, something that's more durable than tissue that gives it a better chance of getting buried and then surviving?

Does it have to be buried in a particular kind of substrate?

Some sediments, some environments are more conducive to preserving the remains.

Some remains to have.

We'll call them high energy environments.

Shallow marine environments may not be the best because things are constantly being tumbled around and sandblasted and so on.

So deeper waters, lower oxygen levels potentially could help preserve remains.

But in the case of sharks and rays, my interests as I was showing you the shark jaw, they have many teeth.

And when you look at a shark, they're constantly producing and replacing teeth throughout their lifetimes.

The teeth are very durable, so even if it was a shallow marine environment, the tooth is very durable.

It can tumble around, it can be buried and brought back to the surface and buried again, and it'll still remain behind.

It'll slowly break down, but they're very, very durable.

So the abundance of remains and their durability, what they're made of really influences where they can be found.

How many you can find, the other part you asked about the coloration of fossils partly is a to what minerals are in the sediment, and what sort of groundwater might be flowing through the sediments.

These fossils on the table here, the fossil shark teeth have lots of phosphate minerals in them and phosphate minerals.

There's various colors to them, but typically the more phosphate that gets incorporated into a fossil, the darker the color might become.

Referred to as phosphatase.

That's 3D printed replica.

There, I was going to say either that, or there's a shark tooth made of charcoal.

As they incorporate more minerals, they become more dense as well.

They become heavier, right?

So coloration varies.

Fossils always have some sort of coloration.

Modern shark teeth or ray teeth are always going to be white.

They have not incorporated those additional minerals.

I forget what the number was.

You said that a shark that size could produce how many teeth over the course of their life if they live a full.

Life, right.

So estimates interpret that to be about 20,000 teeth or more.

If the animals are allowed to live a full life, 20,000 durable teeth.

And that's all the sharks pretty much.

I mean, something in that ballpark, which is why I guess you're going to just keep finding shark.

It's not like you're going to find stop running out shark teeth.

There's a lot of them to be found.

The large ones, the big megalodon teeth and things like that.

Of course, they're easier to see.

They're a lot more, you know, readily collected because of their size.

But small teeth there are very, very abundant.

The species might have been more abundant than megalodon or other large, large tooth species.

So you're going to find a lot more of them, especially if you're in the right geology and the right layers are exposed that contain those fossils in the first place.

When megalodon are no longer around, right?

No.

So so those are a there's a there's a limited quantity of those on the planet technically.

Would they have been creating as many teeth?

I mean, would have megalodon have been making 20,000 teeth over the course?

We estimate that it has the same tooth for generation and replacement process.

So it would have had the same structure as you see in the modern jaw and continuously produced teeth.

Estimates for megalodon age vary.

There's some studies that suggest, you know, grew to be quite old and a long ranging shark, long lived shark.

So it could have produced even more potentially.

So I grew up here.

I've always heard Venice called the shark capital shark Teeth Capital of the world.

Is that completely true?

Is there a smidge of branding to that?

I mean, is it really an outlier when it comes to being able to find an abundance of shark teeth?

I think partly true.

Florida itself might be considered the shark tooth state or region of the world.

There's a ton of sharks to be found here.

Venice being a particular, easily accessible region.

You could collect them right along the beach.

You just walk around the beach and find teeth.

You can snorkel for them, you can dig for them and sift for them just offshore.

Or you can scuba dive for them.

So there's a lot of options in a very small region.

If you're walking on Venice Beach and you find a bunch of shark teeth, it's feasible that one of those is an unidentified shark tooth.

I mean, probably not likely, but but not not completely impossible.

Is that true?

You never know.

We've documented 45 distinct species from the fossil teeth found along Venice.

There's probably a few others that maybe are waiting to be discovered.

Are they going to be new species?

I'm not sure.

Maybe you never know.

But luck plays a big role in fossil collecting.

You just have to be in the right spot at the right time and just have the eye to find something unique.

Of the 45 species that you break down in this paper where they all found underwater, or were some of them found on land?

All of the species, all all.

The focus of that paper is material collected by scuba diving.

How much time do you spend underwater?

Well, I started working on the Venice assemblage, the fossil shark assemblage prior to Covid.

So 20 1617, somewhere in that range, an average dive is going to be 60 minutes to potentially 90 minutes, depending on temperature and depth.

I've have over 500 dives in Venice, so quite a bit of time on the bottom searching for fossils.

On a good day, you might find a handful of different species.

1015 you're not finding all 45 in a day.

The reason for that is the majority of them, half, half of them, about half of them are micro teeth, very small.

You're not going to easily see them without sieving sediments and processing things in the lab.

Yeah, micro.

Very small.

I mean.

Two millimeters.

Some of these almost look like.

Sand grains.

Sand grains, or even just a piece of pepper.

Yep.

Like this one here.

Like, if you look at that under a microscope, that's going to look like a shark tooth.

It's just a little tiny.

Shark and ray teeth.

Yeah, a lot of those smaller ones are stingrays and other types of rays.

They have very small teeth.

When you started doing what?

You wound up publishing this paper on this assemblage, were you doing it to try to come up with this comprehensive a list is possible to publish, or were you just doing research and then you wound up with such a great assemblage, you figured you should present it.

Sort of a little.

Bit of, I don't know how it works in the world.

It was an unreported location.

Very well known shark species unreported.

No peer reviewed scientific manuscripts have reported it.

A lot of amateur field guides, which are great.

Great starting point, especially for the new collector.

But most people focus on the big, really cool objects the big megalodon teeth, the mammoth tooth, whatever else.

That's large, fossil, easy to find.

And those micro teeth were sort of overlooked.

So it was diving not only into the larger fossils, the ones easier to find, and seeing what the actual species breakdown is of those based on our modern view of taxonomy, of how you identify them.

But then looking for those microbes and that involved a lot of sediment processing, a lot of which was done here at FTC in the lab with students.

I've worked with over a dozen different students on this that helped me process sediments in the lab and search through it under microscopes for some of these very small teeth.

So so you're coming back with just I mean, you know, there's this huge area.

Do you just pick you know, it's just dumb luck.

You just pick an area, you collect a sample, you bring it back, you sort through.

It essentially.

So yes.

So we have certain dive sites and they're in different regions across the area, Venice area.

And I would just randomly sample at the end of a dive, take a random sample, bring it back, and then we would save it and then let it dry and then process it.

Some of the samples, of course, were better than others, and that was the luck of the draw.

Some of the teeth that we found, we only have one tooth, one specimen.

That's it in ten years.

And you know, all the sediment samples I've processed with students, we only found one.

So some things are super rare.

But without doing that sort of sampling, you're never going to find them.

Is identifying what it is based on what it looks like, what it's comprised of, or both.

A little of both.

A lot of it is the distinct shape, morphology of it, and then the comparison to modern specimens or other fossil specimens that have been figured, you know, highly figured in publications.

So a lot of it does stem back to looking at the modern representatives.

Have you used I mean, this is going to seem weird, but it's the truth now, you know, machine learning visual.

You can scan a big field of stuff and it can, in a blink, tell you what's in it.

Have you used any of that kind of technique in order to look at all these tiny pieces?

I personally have not.

There's definitely some issues with that, especially on species that look very similar.

Bull sharks and dusky sharks are a great example.

There are different species.

They have very, very similar teeth.

And in the micro teeth sometimes they just it can't detect it because it's so small.

I know some researchers are actually working on that at UF, and they've actually published some material on that.

But it's a great tool.

But I think there's still more to go.

Oh yeah.

Right.

So I just wondering, you know, that would have seemed like Star Trek ten years ago.

And now it's like, oh, there's people you have working on it of the shark teeth that you identified, eight are no longer they're extinct, or maybe one way or another, they're extinct.

Talk about what kind of sharks may have been here back before we were here.

Okay, sir.

Megalodon number one.

Extinct.

Been here?

They were here?

Yep.

All.

How big did they get?

New reports estimate the largest megalodon probably reached 75, maybe pushed 80ft in total length prior to old reports.

Old reports suggested it was short and stout.

Now we think it was maybe long and slender.

So it had a longer a longer size.

So megalodon, great white sharks, fossil white sharks.

We have evidence of them based on their teeth.

And mako sharks.

The relatives to great whites were here bull sharks, dusky sharks, sandbar sharks, a lot of different reef sharks, black tips and spinner sharks, tiger sharks, hammerhead sharks.

The list goes on and on.

Rays.

We have cow nose rays, eagle rays, spotted eagle rays, bull rays, southern stingrays, Atlantic raise a lot of different types of rays, even manta rays.

In the assemblage.

Some of the sawfish are also represented.

We also have, as you said, eight eight species that are not not present here anymore.

And there's a species of tiger shark that are now extinct.

Some of the megalodon is extinct, and other large tooth sharks were once here are extinct.

But we have a species of giant guitar fish that it's not present in the Gulf anymore.

We can find relatives of the ancestors of it elsewhere in the world, but not here in the Gulf.

We have the horn shark heterodox, the horn shark.

It's not present in the Gulf anymore, but it is still present off the coast of Mexico, California, in that area on the west coast.

So changes in sea level and climate have influenced the species assemblage that that's represented in the Venice report.

Is there any part of the shark that does that remains besides teeth, or is the rest of it I mean, the jaw, I guess if it's fossilized, but I know a lot of shark is not really bone, right?

Correct.

Right.

So very rare instances you get the the whole jaw more or less preserved, like teeth in articulated position.

Very rare.

It has happened.

Vertebrae, shark vertebrae occasionally fossilize and denticles.

So denticles are sharkskin basically.

That's why sharks have a rough feel.

If you were ever to touch a shark, they have little tiny microscopic.

They almost look like teeth, but they're called denticles.

They have the same general composition as a tooth, but it's very, very small.

Some sharks might have fin spines of some sort of dorsal spine or fin spine.

They occasionally fossilize.

And then one other common thing related to sharks would be bite marks.

Predation, evidence of their feeding or scavenging activity on bones from marine mammals and other animals.

That's discernible.

Wow.

We're running out of time.

But I want you to hold that thing up.

I mean, what is that?

That's that's a mastodon molar.

That's a Colombian mammoth.

Two mammoth?

Yep.

One tooth from a Colombian mammoth.

If you look, it's got some white spots on it.

It was found scuba diving off shore.

Venice.

There's a lot more to find in Venice.

Besides shark teeth and ray teeth.

You get a lot of terrestrial fossils as well.

This is one tooth from that animal.

And that's.

So there were mammoths.

Mammoths here.

Different time than megalodon.

So because of sea level change, as time progressed, different environments habitats once existed along the coast and offshore, and these animals were once roaming the same areas that megalodon sharks once swam in prior to them.

Deep history is fascinating.

You work with students and you also are you're you're helping the paleontology club.

Is that happening?

Yep.

We have a student run paleontology club here at FGCU.

The advisors for it try and help students organize it and have a series of talks and events that they can do throughout the semester.

Our students these days is likely to be interested in something like this, as they may have been in the past.

It seems like, you know, everything has become so digital that this is pretty much the opposite.

I don't think that's a that's a really good question.

I think that there is a more of a connection.

Students like the hands on element of things.

They like to be able to go out and find their own fossils.

Of course, they love seeing things online or digitally, but actually getting that hands on aspect, I think, is important.

And they enjoy.

And they may not have shark posters on their walls, but they probably have shark accounts that they follow on Instagram.

That's right.

I agree with you there.

Is there a fossil or a tooth that is the one you wish you could find?

That's the last question.

Do you have a white whale fossil tooth?

That's a good question.

Honestly, I don't know.

A really gigantic megalodon tooth would be just.

Or just one that has never been found.

Before, or another new species would be interesting to.

But yeah, megalodon tooth pushing 7.5in in total length would be something really special.

So we'll see.

Well, I appreciate you bringing all this stuff in and talking to me.

Like I said in the intro, I just love finding out all the neat stuff that's happening right here.

Doctor Harry Maisch is an Assistant Professor of Earth Science in the Department of Marine and Earth Sciences at FGCU Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

You can find some links to the work doctor does on our website wgcu.org/gcl Our show today was produced by Emma Rodriguez, with audio production by Matt Krause and video production by David Oquendo.

For now, thanks for listening, Im Mike Kiniry.

This is WGCU-FM Fort Myers 90.1 WMKO Marco Island 91.7 FM.

We are NPR for Southwest Florida.