A 9-million-year-old fossil of one of the extinct relatives of the white shark was presented this Monday in Lima at the Geological, Mining and Metallurgical Institute (Ingemet), which highlighted that the piece includes the contents of the stomach of the large fossilized animal.
The engineer of the Ingemmet Paleontology area, César Augusto Chacaltanastated that the fossil is a young specimen of the Cosmopolitodus hastalisan extinct shark whose adult specimens could reach up to nine meters long.
The expert highlighted the excellent preservation conditions of the fossilwhich includes part of the skeleton and jaw, which has allowed us to observe its stomach contents, teeth and cartilaginous tissue of the animal that inhabited the southern coast of the country in the late Miocene of the Pisco Formation (approximately ago nine million years).
“The type of exceptional fossilization that exists in our territory and in few parts of the planet is reflected in this fossil, because the shark does not have bony bones, it is cartilaginous and the soft material is very difficult to turn into stone, as has happened in our territory,” said Chacaltana in the media presentation of the fossil in the San Borja district.
He maintained that the teeth can be seen in the fossil, and that in his stomach there were sardinesa species that indicated that it does not currently live in the Peruvian sea, but it did 10 million years ago.
Said specimen was collected in the district of Ocucaje, located in the department of Ica, which is mostly desertbut it was formerly a sea, so it houses a large number of marine fossils.
He specified that this was discovered thanks to joint work by Ingemmet, the Natural History Museum of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and the University of Pisa, in Italy.
“This is a very important expression of the natural wealth of our territory in the field of paleontology, which is a discipline linked entirely to geology and that is demonstrable because this fossil is the product of a sedimentation process,” added Chacaltana.
Finally, he invited the national and international scientific community, on behalf of Ingemmet, to work in this area of the country because “it is a deposit of wealth hidden in fossils,” which can help improve geological maps to find necessary minerals. in the technological age.
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