Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont WM Keck Science Faculty Papers W.M. Keck Science Department 12-1-1998 New Caribbean Locality for the Extinct Great White Shark Carcharodon Clare Flemming Donald A. McFarlane Claremont McKenna College; Pitzer College; Scripps College Recommended Citation Flemming, C., and D.A. McFarlane. "New Caribbean locality for the extinct Great White Shark Carcharodon." Caribbean Journal of Science 34 (1998): 317-318. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the W.M. Keck Science Department at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in WM Keck Science Faculty Papers by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NOTES 317 Koopman, K. F., and E. E. Williams. 1951. Fossil Chi- of low relief (< 8 m) and the highlands, a karst plateau roptera collected by H. E. Anthony in Jamaica, rising to roughly 40 m above sea level. The highlands, 1919-1920. Amer. Mus. Nov. 1519:1-29. specifically the Highlands Formation (Brasier and MacPhee, R. D. E. 1984. Quaternary mammal localities Donahue, 1985), are composed of horizontally bedded and Heptaxodontid rodents of Jamaica. Amer. reef limestones of Pliocene age (Watters et al., 1992). Mus. Nov. 2803:1-34. Darby Sink (also known as Darby Cave and Darby’s MacPhee, R. D. E. 1997. Vertebrate paleontology of Cave; 17°38’N, 61°50’W; UTM 299 527) is the largest Jamaican caves. In A. G. Fincham (ed.), Jamaica and best known of a series of distinctive, sheer-walled, Underground: The caves, sinkholes and underground karst collapse features that open from the highlands plateau. Darby Sink is approximately 25 m deep, rivers of the island. 2nd ed. University of West Indies undercut along its northern margin, and large enough Press, Kingston. 447 p. (~ 5400 m2) to support a mesophyllic forest. MacPhee, R. D. E., and C. Flemming. In press. Requiem Carcharodon is represented by a single upper tooth aeternum: The last 500 years of mammalian species (Fig. 1) which we extracted from the eroding Pliocene extinctions. In R. D. E. MacPhee (ed.), Extinctions in limestone wall, some six meters above the floor at the Near Time: Context, Causes, and Consequences. Ple- northern end of Darby Sink. Much of the tooth is miss- num Press, New York. ing, but the remaining portion includes features diag- MacPhee, R. D. E., D. C. Ford, and D. A. McFarlane. nostic of this genus. The tooth conforms in size and 1989. Pre-Wisconsinan mammals from Jamaica and morphology to Carcharodon megalodon (Agassiz, 1843), models of late Quaternary extinction in the Greater an extinct great white shark. Antilles. Quat. Res. 31:94-106. Applegate and Espinosa-Arrubarrena (1996) sug- McFarlane, D. A., and R. E. Gledhill. 1985. The Quater- gested that the oldest C. megalodon specimens date to nary bone caves at Wallingford, Jamaica. Cave Sci. the middle Miocene, while the youngest dated speci- 12:127-128. men with stratigraphic control is from the late McFarlane, D. A., R. D. E. MacPhee, and D. C. Ford. Pliocene—up to but not beyond the Tertiary/Quater- 1998. Body size variability and a Sangamonian nary boundary. Applegate and Espinosa-Arrubarrena extinction model for Amblyrhiza, a West Indian rejected Pleistocene records for this species on the grounds that such specimens are, “reworked materials megafaunal rodent. Quat. Res. 50:80-89. or teeth dredged from the ocean floor where [they] Miller, G. S. 1929. Mammals eaten by Indians, owls could easily be Pliocene.” The pre-Quaternary global and Spaniards in the coast region of the Dominican range of the genus Carcharodon includes sites from Republic. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections Europe, North America, Australia, South America, 82(5):1-16. East Indies, New Zealand, New Caledonia, and else- Morgan, G. S. 1993. Quaternary land vertebrates of where in the West Indies (Carroll, 1988; personal obs.), Jamaica. In R. M. Wright and E. Robinson (eds.), although Applegate and Espinosa-Arrubarrena Biostratigraphy of Jamaica. Mem. Geol. Soc. Amer. argued that the aberrant Eocene New Zealand record 182:417-442. should be “disregarded until [it] can be validated.” Woods, C. A. 1989. The biogeography of West Indian The Barbuda specimen has been deposited in the rodents. In C. A. Woods (ed.), Biogeography of the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda (MAB), St. John’s, West Indies, Past, Present and Future. pp. 741-798. Antigua, under accession number MAB 997-008. Since Sandhill Crane Press, Gainesville. 878 pp. we cannot determine from which side of the jaw this specimen came, we have refrained from designating “medial” and “lateral.” Using Hubbell’s (1996) proto- Caribbean Journal of Science, Vol. 34, No. 3-4, 317-318, 1998 col as a guide, the measurements of MAB 997-008 are: Copyright 1998 College of Arts and Sciences maximum natural width = 73.75 mm; maximum University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez height = 101.05 mm; left margin in labial view = 120 serrations; right margin in labial view = 84 serrations. New Caribbean Locality for the Extinct No angle was discerned. Diagnostic features of the Great White Shark Carcharodon species include the great size, triangular shape, and the fine serrations along the margins of the tooth (J. megalodon Maisey, pers. comm.). Other species of the genus Car- charodon exhibit large size or serrations, but this com- Clare Flemming1 and Donald A. bination is apparently unique to C. megalodon. McFarlane21Department of Mammalogy, American Comparative specimens abound in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY 10024, USA. Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) Department of fl[email protected]. 2Joint Science Department, The Clar- Vertebrate Paleontology (e.g., AMNH-VP 13220). emont Colleges, Claremont, CA 91711, USA. dmc- [email protected]. Acknowledgments.—We thank Desmond Nicholson, John Fuller, and MacKenzie Frank for encouragement, The current exposure of Barbuda, an island of the assistance with logistics, and permission to work on Limestone Arc, northern Lesser Antilles, West Indies, Barbuda for the 1997 field season. Maurice “Tomach” is but a fraction of a much larger submerged carbonate Nedd provided invaluable field assistance. Ross bank. Modern subaerial Barbuda is composed of two MacPhee (AMNH) generously supported CF’s geological and physiographical units—the marginal involvement in this project. Craig Chesek (AMNH) plain, consisting of Pleistocene and Holocene deposits executed the photographs. John Maisey, Bob Evander, 318 NOTES FIG. 1. Partial upper tooth of Carcharodon megalodon (MAB 997-008) recovered from Pliocene strata of Barbuda. a, labial view; b, lingual view. Scale bar = 5 mm. Carl Mehling (all AMNH), and Manuel Iturralde- Paleoshorelines and Prehistory: An Investigation Vinent (Museo Nacional de Ciencias Natural, Havana) of Method. CRC Press: Boca Raton. all gave generously of their expertise in identifying the taxon. We thank our reviewers for their improvements to our manuscript. Funding was provided by the Keck Research Fund, Joint Science Department of the Clare- Caribbean Journal of Science, Vol. 34, No. 3-4, 318-319, 1998 Copyright 1998 College of Arts and Sciences mont Colleges, and Pitzer College, as part of a joint University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Claremont College/American Museum project. LITERATURE CITED Pugheadedness in a Largemouth Bass/ Applegate, S. P., and L. Espinosa-Arrubarrena. 1996. Florida Largemouth Bass Hybrid from The fossil history of Carcharodon and its possible Puerto Rico: The Fifth Record in Large- ancestor, Cretolamna: a study in tooth identifica- mouth Basses tion. Pp. 19-36 in A. P. Klimley and D. G. Ainley (eds.), Great White Sharks: The Biology of Carchar- LUCY BUNKLEY-WILLIAMS1 AND ERNEST H. WILLIAMS, odon carcharias. Academic Press: New York. JR.21Caribbean Aquatic Animal Health Project, Depart- Brasier, M., and H. Donahue. 1985. Barbuda—an ment of Biology, University of Puerto Rico, PO Box 9012, emerging reef and lagoon complex on the edge of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico 00681-9012, 2Department of the Lesser Antilles island arc. J. Geol. Soc. London Marine Sciences, University of Puerto Rico, PO Box 908, 142:1101-1117. Lajas, Puerto Rico 00667-0980. Carroll, R. L. 1988. Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolu- tion. W. H. Freeman and Company: New York, 698 Micropterus salmoides pp. Largemouth bass, (Lacepede), (Centrarchidae) is the most important sport fish in Hubbell, G. 1996. Using tooth structure to determine North America. Only four cases of shortened upper the evolutionary history of the white shark. Pp. 9- jaws and skulls (pugheadedness) have been described 18 in A. P. Klimley and D. G. Ainley (eds.), Great in this species although it is probably one of the best White Sharks: The Biology of Carcharodon carchar- examined of fishes. Bunkley-Williams and Williams ias. Academic Press: New York. (1995) examined large numbers of this fish in Puerto Watters, D. R., J. Donahue, and R. Stuckenrath. 1992. Rico but found no anomalies other than spinal curva- Paleoshorelines and the Prehistory of Barbuda, ture (blamed on mycobacterial infections instead of West Indies. Pp. 15-52 in L. L. Johnson (ed.), anomalies). We describe the first case of pugheaded-.