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Specimen of the Week: Week 123

By Emma-Louise Nicholls, on 17 February 2014

As a palaeontologist, I spend a lot of time thinking about how species known only from the fossil record may have looked in life. Take Helicoprion for example. WHAT is THAT about? We currently have no way of knowing for sure where that tooth whorl goes on Helicoprion, so we make an educated guess. The result of which is the weirdest shark’s mouth the world has ever seen. Surrounded by skeletons at the Grant Museum, I sometimes wonder if we would ever have arrived at an accurate morphological reconstruction of some of the species, whose skeletons don’t really resemble the living thing. The species featured this week, is one such animal. This week’s Specimen of the Week is… (more…)