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The mackerel shark, Otodus obliquus, is an extinct fish species related to, and much older than, their larger cousin, the megalodon (Otodus megalodon). These sharks were an apex predator, eating fish, other sharks and from 55 million years ago, marine mammals. Part of the order of Lamniformes which includes the modern day white shark, it would have been between 9 to 12 metres long with five gill slits, two dorsal fins and without a third eye lid, known as a nictitating membrane. With their skeleton composed of cartilage rather than bone, it is rare to find any part of them preserved in the fossil record apart from their vertebrae and teeth, the largest of which reach 10cm long.
These particular fossils come from sharks once living in a sea where the Sahara Desert is now, although the species likely had a world wide distribution. It took at least 10,000 years for each shark tooth to fossilise, or turn to stone, in the sediments of this ancient ocean floor. This occurred before they were raised up by tectonic plate movement to their location of discovery in the Atlas Mountains and prior to development of the desert, now thought to be about 7 million years old.
