GSI team discovers fossils of Jurassic age hybodont sharks in Jaisalmer

Jaisalmer: In a rare discovery, teeth of new species of hybodont shark  of Jurassic age have been reported for the first time by a team of officers of the Geological Survey of India (GSI) from the Jurassic rocks (approximately, between 160 and 168 million-years-old) of the Jaisalmer region of Rajasthan. 

This discovery by a team from the GSI, Western Region, Jaipur comprising  Krishna Kumar, Pragya Pandey, Triparna Ghosh and Debasish Bhattacharya, marks an important milestone in the study of Jurassic vertebrate fossils in the Jaisalmer region, and it opens a new window for further research in the domain of vertebrate fossils.

Hybodonts, an extinct group of sharks, was a dominant group of fishes in both marine and fluvial environments during the Triassic and early Jurassic time. However, hybodont sharks started to decline in marine environments from the Middle Jurassic onwards until they formed a relatively minor component of open-marine shark assemblages. Hybodonts finally became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous time 65 million years ago.

The team . has published its finding in Historical Biology, a Journal of Palaeontology of international repute, in its August, 2021 issue. Professor Dr. Sunil Bajpai, Head of the Department, Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, who is a co-author of this publication, played a significant role in the identification and documentation of this important discovery.

Significantly, the newly discovered crushing teeth from Jaisalmer represent a new species named by the research team as Strophodusjaisalmerensis. The genus Strophodus has been identified for the first time from the Indian subcontinent and is only the third such record from Asia, the other two being from Japan and Thailand. The new species has recently been included in the Shark references.com, an international platform operating in association with International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Species Survival Commission (SSC), and Germany.

– global bihari bureau