A handout image provided by scientific magazine Nature showing a reconstitution of the falcatid shark,
A handout image provided by scientific magazine Nature showing a reconstitution of the falcatid shark,

MONTPELLIER (FRANCE)- Sharks that are no longer than 30cm in length and with a hook-like dorsal fin? These mini-sharks, that lived in an ocean, covering what today is Southern France, lived longer than was thought before.

The falcatid shark, one of the three Cladodontomorph shark species was supposed to have perished in Earth’s “Great Dying” event some 250mn years ago. Yet scientists discovered samples of their miniscule fossil teeth which prove they existed still a 120 million years ago. A team from Geneva’s Natural History Museum and France’s Montpellier University uncovered six such teeth in sediment near the southern French town of Montpellier from the early Cretaceous period, when the area would have been under water.

The planet’s worst mass extinction, the “Great Dying”, wiped out 95 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species at the end of the Permian period, when Earth was believed to have had a single continent surrounded by a single ocean. Theories for the cause of the catastrophe include an asteroid impact that smothered the planet in dust which obscured the Sun and shrivelled vegetation, or a fierce period of vulcanism that caused a mixture of acid rain and global warming.

Among the creatures thought to have disappeared were Cladodontomorph sharks, distant cousins of modern sharks, which sported jaws with several rows of tiny, sharp teeth.