Scientists from Israel, Germany and Egypt discovered a mysterious cache with petrified shark teeth during excavations in David in Jerusalem. The cache’s age is estimated at 2900 years, and the fossils themselves are at least 80 kilometers from the place where they could be found. This is reported in the article published in the Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution magazine. Briefly about the study describes the press release on Phys.org.
Teeth turned out to be buried in the cultural layers of the Iron Age in the ruins of the structure located near the source of Gihon (also known as the source of the Virgin Mary) southeast of the old city of Jerusalem and called “Pool, cut from the rock” (English. The Rock Cut Pool ). The structure is dated to the VIII-VII centuries to our era and is a rectangular structure carved in a limestone rock, 15 10 meters with vertical walls. It was probably part of an underground water system, providing access to water at the time of siege. At the beginning of the VIII century, the construction was transformed into a private house, and the pool was falling asleep with limestone boulders and soil.
During the excavations, about 10 thousand remains of fish was found here, as well as 6.5 tons of clay dishes and several hundred one-time clay seals, known as bulls and used to seal confidential letters and packages. The taxonomic composition of fish whose fossils were found, included 14 fish family, most of which (about 90 percent) were inhabited in the Mediterranean Sea (mostly sea crucible Sparidae and Kefali Mugilidae), as well as some freshwater animals (about 8.5 percent) , including those that lived in Nile. 39 teeth and central vertebrae belonged to cartilage fishes to which sharks and slides include.
Analysis of the ratios of strontium-87 isotopes and strontium-86 showed that some teeth clearly belonged to the fossil sharks and occur from the sediments of the late Cretaceous period. The isotopic signature of oxygen-18 in phosphates, of which consists of emeloids (structural analogues of enamel in sharks), characteristic of the tropical sea water of the ocean thethis. The age of these teeth is 80 million years. Similar fossils were discovered in the Negev desert, located almost a hundred kilometers from the city of David. The teeth belonged to several types of extinct sharks, including Squalicorax, reaching 2-5 meters in length
Scientists assume that the teeth were initially assembled by collectors, but there is no confirmation of this. There are no traces of wear, which could indicate that fossils were used as tools, and there are no drilled holes characteristic of jewelry.