{"id":145654,"date":"2025-11-21T01:32:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T01:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/145654\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T01:32:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T01:32:11","slug":"major-discovery-proves-gigantic-sharks-roamed-australias-coastlines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/145654\/","title":{"rendered":"Major discovery proves gigantic sharks roamed Australia’s coastlines"},"content":{"rendered":"

A major archeological find in Western Australia’s north-west has helped prove gigantic sharks roamed the state’s coast 115 million years ago.<\/p>\n

The work of Dr Mikael Siversson from the WA Museum helped rewrite the timeline for one of the planet’s most fearsome predators.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The head of earth and planetary sciences played a crucial role in identifying a species of super shark fossil found in Australia.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/“That tooth is 97 million years old, still razor sharp” (9News)<\/p>\n

His breakthrough discovery in WA’s Gascoyne region included teeth that hold the key to a prehistoric world.<\/p>\n

“That tooth is 97 million years old, still razor sharp,” he told 9News.<\/p>\n

The teeth helped Siversson and his research team identify something straight out of Jurassic Park, a group of closely related mega sharks that grew to the size of orcas around Darwin and in Queensland.<\/p>\n

“They dominated the oceans for about 23 million years,” Siversson said.<\/p>\n

Siversson’s original discovery was in 1999 in the Giralia Range on Cardabia Station, in Baiyungu country.<\/p>\n

It was a major scientific find but the real importance of the discovery only emerged recently.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/Dr Mikael Siversson’s original discovery was in 1999 in the Giralia Range on Cardabia Station, in Baiyungu country. (9News)<\/p>\n

He said they were the first modern great sharks to evolve into giant-sized sharks, and it happened off the coast of Australia.<\/p>\n

“So that’s why the Western Australian specimen is so critical to the understanding of this entire group of giant predatory sharks,” he said.<\/p>\n

His work also identified that colossal sharks swam the oceans 10 million years earlier than previously thought.<\/p>\n

All from teeth and vertebrae found in the WA outback.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A major archeological find in Western Australia’s north-west has helped prove gigantic sharks roamed the state’s coast 115…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":{"0":"post-145654","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}