Kenshu Shimada of DePaul University in Chicago was searching the drawers for specimens of fish teeth. For a while, the largest one he came across was the size of his thumb. Then he discovered a 'humongous' one, 117 mm wide.
James Kirkland, state palaeontologist at the Utah Geological Survey, identified the tooth as coming from the upper jaw of a lungfish in the extinct genus Ceratodus, a freshwater bottom-feeder which used massive tooth plates to crunch shelled animals.
Lungfish are among our closest living piscine relatives. Kirkland and Shimada estimate the new Ceratodus was at least 4 metres long, beating the previous record of 3.5 metres for an African fossil. The largest living lungfish come in at almost 2 metres.
Kirkland and Shimada suspect the monster lungfish, which dates from between 160 million and 100 million years ago – during the age of dinosaurs – fed on turtles."
via New Scientist/read more
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