Shark Relative Had Buzz Saw Mouth

I've known about the creature for a long time, but River Monsters was the first time I saw anyone theorizing about how it actually might have looked or hunted.

It was interesting to see that because I've always sort of wondered why on earth it would have a jaw constructed like that.

a reply to: ketsuko
To the sawfish the functionality of the saw like appendage is very likely sensory as well as the function of the hammer head.

And of course there are schools of though that this is an issue of dynamics related to water though it could be both.

That is not the point of this particular development in nature which makes it really interesting.

A question that I have is why has this type of shark never reemerged in nature given it is such an efficient killer?

Any thoughts?

originally posted by: butcherguy
a reply to: Kashai

The way that I understand a circular saw (from having cut things with them), they actually rotate 360 degrees.
This shark-like creature had a unique set of teeth, but they were more similar to a snail's shell than a circular saw blade. The teeth did not spin in the jaw 'like a buzz saw'.
It is still a theory that the tooth whorl even grew inside of the mouth.
Scientific American

You are incorrect..

After over 100 years, the mystery of the Helicoprion jaw is solved. That doesn’t make the prehistoric fish any less enigmatic. With only a single blade of teeth, how did Helicoprion actually catch and consume prey? Tapanila and other researchers are only just starting to investigate this question. Based on the new restoration, Tapanila suggests that “The analogy to a circular saw is almost perfect.” Not only was the tooth whorl shaped like a saw, but, Tapanila points out, “as the jaw closed [the tooth whorl] rotated the teeth backwards in a rotational saw motion.” Such a strategy would have worked well on squid and other soft-bodied cephalopods of the 270 million year old seas. But even with this realization, we are still left with the question of how such a strange arrangement – singular in the history of life on Earth – evolved in the first place.

Tapanila and colleagues are keeping after the enigmas surrounding the fish through studying Helicoprion fossils found in Idaho and elsewhere, including a lower jaw that’s even bigger than the one used in the new Biology Letters study. “You know the line from JAWS, ‘You’re going to need a bigger boat’? Well, I need a bigger CT machine,” Tapanila says. “I have the world’s largest Helicoprion specimen in the world sitting in my museum, and I see evidence for jaws.” The two-foot-wide jaw is too big for a conventional CT scanner, though. “It’s got all the features we hope,” Tapanila says, “but it’s massive, so I need to bring it to [a facility in] Pasadena.” That giant jaw will yield additional clues, and raise new questions. Tapanila suspects that the larger jaw belonged to a different species of Helicoprion than the one he and his team previously scanned, and the features of the bigger jaw might provide new information about how these buzzsaw fish differed across species and body sizes. There are still many secrets to draw out from the jaws of Helicoprion.

Yet, even with the remaining mysteries, to see the new vision come out of the rock is a dream come true for Ray Troll. “It’s been a twenty year quest for me,” he says, which all started “when I first saw a whorl and became obsessed by it.” “I’ve drawn the animal so many hundreds of times. Literally hundreds.” And not only is Troll “thrilled” to see the new research, but the new identity of Helicoprion is a bit of a personal victory. Troll heads the wonderfully geeky band Ray Troll and the Ratfish Wranglers. For so long, it seemed that the object of his endless fascination was a shark, but now, Troll says, “It’s really cool to have [Helicoprion] circle back around” to the ratfish side of the family tree. “My two obsessions have all converged,” Troll enthuses, in a spectacular ratfish relative that has for so long challenged scientists to chase after its circuitous spiral trail.

Source

Any thoughts?

a reply to: Kashai

If I remember the show correctly, they belonged to a single species in a land-locked sea that dried up.

It may very well be that they came about as a species that filled a very specific niche, sort of like an Aye-aye with its long digits. So while we see something very lethally efficient in the fossil, it may have served a singular, very specific purpose that the fossil record doesn't and can't tell us, and without that niche, there may be no reason for it. So we don't see anything like it again.

originally posted by: proob4
I looked on Home depot, Lowes, Menards and other sites. just what is a Buzzsaw exactly?

Your problem is that you do not check your facts before posting.


I am just Denying Ignorance at this point

a reply to: ketsuko

That must have been one heck of a sea!!!

As a solution to the ability of catching prey.

a reply to: Kashai

You are incorrect.. 

Then it should be no problem for you to post a picture of a circular saw blade that is coiled up like a snail shell with progressively smaller teeth on the inside of the coil.
And a saw that uses that blade without spinning it in a full circle.

a reply to: butcherguy

Excuse me I have posted all the data that is available. If you are suggesting that scientist who presented the conclusion is wrong, perhaps you should send him an Email.

The link is from National Geographic's.

originally posted by: Kashai
a reply to: butcherguy

Excuse me I have posted all the data that is available. If you are suggesting that scientist who presented the conclusion is wrong, perhaps you should send him an Email.

No. He said that the analogy to a circular saw is almost perfect.
In your OP, you said that it was 'in no ways different'.

Do you understand what I am saying?

a reply to: butcherguy

Almost perfect could be construed in the sense of in no ways different.

In context the animal could, as he or she was approaching prey moved there mouths is such a way as to cause....

“as the jaw closed [the tooth whorl] rotated the teeth backwards in a rotational saw motion.”

So essentially do you understand what I am saying is that when the animal attacked prey, it moved its mouth so as to cause.....

“as the jaw closed [the tooth whorl] rotated the teeth backwards in a rotational saw motion.”

This allowed the animals to slice through animals that had no spine very quickly and there are plenty of animals like that, on Earth at the moment.


Any thoughts?

a reply to: ketsuko
In relation to Giant Squid the injuries to Whales that hunt them are numerous so for me it is difficult to understand how today, this is not functional in effect to survival.

As Fish go, the Shark is one that can go the deepest.

a reply to: KashaiOk so according to this Girl in the video it is "kinda a pizza cutter" lol. I promise I wont go there.
Look about last night I was a lil blasted and was sarcastic as hell. Maybe this topic is more intriguing than I first led eyes onto.

My apologies! I give you a S&F

a reply to: proob4

Accepted

a reply to: proob4

Perhaps then next time you post in this Forum you should actually do something that is currently called "Reading"???

Personally I do not enjoy being misrepresented over something, I to the liberty to check into, as to Facts.

a reply to: proob4

And do not feel bad.

I have been posting in Forums since the early 90's and I assure you there have been times where upon impulse I posted a response that turned out to be completely wrong.

I have been posting at Forums since the days America Online (AOL), was run out of a Garage.

At the time there was also CompuServe and Prodigy.

I've known about Helicoprion for awhile, and recall seeing the first picture in the original list k several years ago. That said, it's still quite interesting, how many crazy, one-off species evolution produced back in those times. As for it's mouth operating like a buzzsaw, or circular saw, anybody can tell that's not the case, and is just hyperbole meant to make it more interesting.

As long as we're on the subject of ancient sharks, though, here's something I just found today. Just a little one, but in beautiful shape....

a reply to: AdmireTheDistance
What is your basis for that position?

Contrary to the popular long-jaw restorations, the tooth whorl of Helicoprion totally filled the lower jaw. The jaw joint sat right behind the weapon, and the spiral dentition was buttressed by jaw cartilage on either side. And, even stranger, Helicoprion didn’t have any upper teeth to speak of. The spiral of continually-added teeth was the creature’s entire dental armament.

Scraps of Helicoprion skull indicate that the fish wasn’t really a shark, either. Of course, as Tapanila points out, the word “shark” doesn’t have the simple definition we might expect. “‘Shark’ doesn’t have biological meaning anymore,” Tapanila told me, confiding “If I talk to a fish expert, and I say ‘shark,’ they get very angry.” Ichthyologists are rapidly rearranging the fish family tree and the definitions for different groups. All the same, the skull cartilage of Helicoprion included a very specific double connection that is characteristic of a group of cartilaginous fish called Euchondrocephali – commonly known as ratfish and chimeras.

Helicoprion was not a buzzsaw predecessor to great white or tiger sharks. The fish belonged to the lineage one branch over, near the evolutionary split where the ancestors of living sharks and ratfish parted ways. (And this pulls other weird prehistoric fish with fearsome teeth – such as the scissor-jawed Edestus – away from the shark line and into the ratfish line.) In general form, Tapanila and Troll expect, Helicoprion was an archaic member of the wider ratfish group that looked quite shark-like. And these predators reached impressive sizes. Tapanila estimates that a large Helicoprion would have been about 20 to 25 feet long.

Same Source

So what exactly are the exact chances that Jessica Biel would dump Justin Timberlake for you???