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Many forum members are familiar with Cookiecutter Creek in South Florida. This is a small creek that well-known forum member Jeff @jcbshark was kind enough to share with me a little over 3 years ago. Jeff had posted photos of the tiny Cookiecutter Shark (Isistius triangulus) teeth that he had found picking through micro-matrix from this creek and that started my quest to obtain a tooth from this very unusual little shark. After picking through many gallons of micro-matrix from the Peace River and some of its feeder creeks without once laying eyes upon a single Isistius tooth (but finding tons of other micro fossils), Jeff informed me that he didn't think Cookiecutters could be found anywhere other than one special little creek and agreed to take me and Tammy to collect some micro-matrix there in mid-December 2014.

 

It didn't take long for me to find my first complete Isistius. Several more soon followed including some from the positionally rare symphyseal spot in the middle of the lower jaw. It is possible to identify a symphyseal as the thinner area where each tooth overlaps the adjoining tooth is usually found with one overlap area seen on the inner and one on the outer surface of each tooth but not symphyseals. Since these teeth overlap BOTH the tooth to the left and right (like the top row of shingles on the ridge of a roof) the overlap marks are both found on the inner (lingual) surface of the tooth and no marks are found on the outer (labial) surface. Once you know how the teeth of the lower jaw overlap and how to identify the outer (labial) side of the tooth (the enamel does not stop at a well defined line but extends down from the triangular crown and onto the square root), you can also tell which side of the jaw (left or right) that the tooth came from. Aside from the symphyseal position most of the other teeth cannot be identified to position other than the last one or two posterior positions. These teeth have the crown angled with respect to the root.

 

Here are some of my old posts showing Cookiecutter Creek and the micro-fossils that have come from this unique locality in Florida:

 

http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/51286-collecting-cookiecutter-shark-micro-matrix/

http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/55298-more-micros-from-the-peace-river-and-cookiecutter-creek/

http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/71406-optimizing-micro-matrix-sorting/

 

Recently, I've been working on a project with a PhD student from the University of Florida which was initiated when it was realized that the Isistius triangulus teeth that I donated to the FLMNH were not yet recognized as occurring in Florida. Additional research revealed that specimens of Squatina (Angelshark) teeth from this creek were also not known from Florida (though I've also found this genus in micro-matrix from the Peace River).

 

I made another collection of micro-matrix from Cookiecutter Creek as I had exhausted my supplies. A couple of flat-rate boxes of this material made their way into the hands of a couple of forum members--who I hope are having fun with this unique micro-matrix. Tony @ynot had sent me photos of another interesting find from Cookiecutter Creek. Jeff had collected some additional micro-matrix on the day that he introduced me to this site. Some of that collection was later made available to Tony as an auction to benefit the forum. While looking through this micro-matrix, Tony discovered a small specimen of what appears to be a Catshark (Scyliorhinidae) tooth. Tony is graciously sending that tooth to me so that I can pass it along to be added to the collection at the Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH) as this is the first record of this shark family in the Florida fossil record (and another first for Cookiecutter Creek). Tony's photo if this micro beauty:

 

post-16416-0-31445600-1423169368.jpg.f49bb4aef59ab3b4a3eae53985a305ab.jpg

 

Since learning of the possibility of this taxon being found in the micro-matrix of Cookiecutter Creek, I've been searching through my remaining stash from this locality hoping to find a second Catshark tooth (no luck yet). While I've (so far) struck out in duplicating Tony's amazing find, I did have a bit of luck last week with something else new from my searching. While picking through the micro-matrix I came across an elongated item just about 10mm in length. If I'd not been familiar with this type of highly unusual shark tooth before I might have passed it by thinking it was just some unidentifiable fragment of bone. Experience and knowledge (even just a small amount) allowed me to recognize this as a tooth type that is reasonable common in another type of wonderful micro-matrix--Shark Tooth Hill (Bakersfield, CA).

 

The unusual tooth from Cookiecutter Creek is actually quite common in STH micro-matrix. It comes from a Horn Shark (Heterodontidae). Since there is currently only a single genus described for this small family of small sharks, it can actually be identified down to the genus Heterodontus. These are placid little sharks that I remember seeing resting on the bottom during the few dives I did among the kelp forests in southern California's Channel Islands. They have distinctive ridges over the eyes and a single spike at the leading edge of their two dorsal fins. They feed mainly on hard-shelled invertebrates (crustaceans, molluscs, and echinoderms). Their name "Heterodontus" derives from the Greek meaning "different teeth" and referring to the fact that the front teeth are pointy with larger central cusp flanked by a smaller cusp on either side. The back teeth elongated with a long ridge running the length of the tooth and are adapted to crushing the hard shells of their prey items.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_shark

 

Currently, most members of this family are found in the Indo-Pacific--like the well-known Port Jackson Shark (Heterodontus portusjacksoni) and only the Californian Horn Shark (Heterodontus francisci), the Galapagos Bullhead Shark (Heterodontus quoyi), and the Mexican Hornshark (Heterodontus mexicanus) are found in the eastern Pacific off the west coasts of North and South America. It's difficult to make any firm conclusions from the scant images available online but the rear teeth of the Mexican species to have a reasonable resemblance to the specimen that turned up in Cookiecutter Creek.

 

2018-03-08 Heterodontus 600x900.jpg    Heterodontus_mexicanus_jaws.jpg

 

 

Today, there are no species from this family inhabiting the Atlantic (or the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico regions). Devoid of any factual information but attempting a modestly educated guess, I'm thinking that one of the species of Bullhead Sharks must have extended over into the waters surrounding Florida some time before the Isthmus of Panama formed some 2.8 mya separating the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and separating the fauna on either side to either develop into distinct species (or to go extinct regionally). Since this family is not currently known from the Atlantic (eastern or western extents) it seems more reasonable to assume that the Florida specimen derived from an eastern Pacific species given the (geologically) recent connection to those waters. Fun to speculate and if Marco Sr @MarcoSr has jaw samples of extant eastern Pacific members of this family, perhaps a better comparison to the anterior teeth might be possible.

 

Both this tiny Heterodontus tooth and Tony's find of the Scyliorhinidae will soon be headed toward Gainesville. I'm hoping to get up to volunteer at Montbrook in the next couple of weeks and plan on dropping off a few donations to expand the museum's diversity of shark teeth from Florida. Cookiecutter Creek is a special little creek and is best known for its relative abundance of Isistius triangulus teeth. The more we investigate this locality and the more micro-matrix we pick through from there the more unusual taxa seem to turn up. Seeing a perfect little Cookiecutter tooth appear from the micro-matrix is always a thrill but this creek is no longer a one-trick pony. It seems to have hidden depths (for a creek that is only knee high :P) and I'm looking forward to seeing what else might appear out of the gravel in the future.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

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Thanks for sharing this interesting information!:dinothumb:

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I like Trilo-butts and I cannot lie.

 

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Hi,

 

Very interesting ! :popcorn:

 

Coco

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Tiny little things can be a really big deal!
Here is where Jeff's unselfish sharing of his magic site is changing what we know.
Kudos to all the players in this unfolding knowledge!

"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about." - Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

>Paleontology is an evolving science.

>May your wonders never cease!

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Yup. Were it not for Jeff being generous with that information science would know a lot less about the fossil shark fauna of Florida. We still try to keep this place a bit dark and under wraps as it has been abused in the past. Many years ago, someone who was not interested in looking for micros but the larger teeth, megs and "makos" that are also found there, took a gasoline powered pump and a hose and was hitting the bank with pressurized water to quickly wash out a large amount of potentially fossil-bearing sediment (and doing enormous damage to the bank). It's this kind of rare senseless behavior that gives fossil hunters a collective bad name. Members of this forum are, by and large, a much more sensible crowd but it still makes sense to be a bit circumspect on the location of this special spot. There is still a lot to learn from this creek and we'd hate the authorities to have to post it off limits.

 

Forum members far and wide have experienced the thrill of hunting Isistius triangulus teeth from this creek without ever visiting it due to the occasional auctions we've had to benefit the forum. It takes me at least a full 8-hour day to make a collection there--6 hours roundtrip driving and a couple of hours of backbreaking shoveling and sifting. More time spent washing and drying the micro-matrix but all totally worth it to see what tiny treasures may be hiding within.

 

If I can get back out there and collect some more micro-matrix a large flat-rate box may appear on a forum auction in the future....;)

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

P.S.: Since this micro-matrix has been spread far and wide and quite a few TFF members have picked through it, I'd like to open the invitation to anybody to post unusual finds that came from Cookiecutter Creek. Who knows what other novel taxa may be sitting in someone's collection right now that could further science and the fossil faunal picture of Florida.

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Thanks for that informative post, Ken, and for helping to unearth those new finds, figuratively and literally. TFF never ceases to amaze me with the wealth of knowledge and experiences freely shared here. :dinothumb:

Start the day with a smile and get it over with.

 

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Great write up Ken  and congrats to both you and Tony on the good eye to pick out  those little rarities. Some pretty amazing things have come from there for sure:fistbump:

Every once in a great while it's not just a big rock down there!

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I only learned of the cookiecutter shark about 2 years ago.  A very odd but very cool little shark!  Thanks for the info

 

RB

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Hi Ken, great write up. Congrats to you on your finds and taking it to UF. That catshark Tony found is amazing. They are an uncommon find in Miocene / Pliocene matrix here in NC. Your Heterodontus is also an amazing find. Don't think I have seen one from the Miocene / Pliocene here in NC. But, I have an Eocene site where they are not unusual to find. I will have to go through my bags of stuff from the matrix I received from Jeff. 

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Thanks. Be sure to let us all know of anything out of the ordinary that you find in the Cookiecutter Creek micro-matrix. We've got a good idea of all of the common species of sharks and rays that can be found in this locality but the rarities take a lot of picking through gallons of micro-matrix before they show up. But, thankfully, just a single occurrence of a distinctive unusual tooth is enough to expand the list of taxa represented in this special little creek.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

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28 minutes ago, sixgill pete said:

Your Heterodontus is also an amazing find. Don't think I have seen one from the Miocene / Pliocene here in NC

Oligocene is the youngest I'm aware of anywhere around the Atlantic. This Florida tooth would extend the time period for Heterodontus in the Atlantic quite a bit.

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Even cooler!

 

Do you have any references to Heterodontus in the Atlantic? For obvious reasons I'm keen on learning more about this genus.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

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22 minutes ago, digit said:

Even cooler!

 

Do you have any references to Heterodontus in the Atlantic? For obvious reasons I'm keen on learning more about this genus.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

Earlier today I was looking at a few online and pdf references and didn’t see any occurrences younger than Oligocene for the US and Europe. I just did a Google Scholar search and found that they survived longer in the Caribbean and south Atlantic, at least to the late Miocene. 

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What confuses Me is - the heterodontus are a shallow water species while cookie cutters are a deep water species.

What are their teeth doing in the same deposit?

Darwin said: " Man sprang from monkeys."

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Cookiecutters spend a good portion of their time at depth but apparently make daily migrations to shallower waters to feed (at least the extant species do this). I guess it is possible that tooth shedding may be happening during the shallower water feeding phase and that might explain why we are finding these teeth in the landlocked Cookiecutter Creek and not someplace like the deeper water "meg ledges" (80-120 feet current depth) that were likely even deeper in the past. I don't know that anybody has spent limited (and expensive) underwater time on these meg tooth dives to collect micro-matrix. I'm not even sure there is a dense enough gravel bed to contain micro-matrix where these dives focus on collecting. Would be really interesting to look through any micro-matrix that could be collected from such a location to see what micros might be found.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

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On 3/12/2018 at 6:45 PM, digit said:

Today, there are no species from this family inhabiting the Atlantic (or the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico regions). Devoid of any factual information but attempting a modestly educated guess, I'm thinking that one of the species of Bullhead Sharks must have extended over into the waters surrounding Florida some time before the Isthmus of Panama formed some 2.8 mya separating the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and separating the fauna on either side to either develop into distinct species (or to go extinct regionally). Since this family is not currently known from the Atlantic (eastern or western extents) it seems more reasonable to assume that the Florida specimen derived from an eastern Pacific species given the (geologically) recent connection to those waters. Fun to speculate and if Marco Sr @MarcoSr has jaw samples of extant eastern Pacific members of this family, perhaps a better comparison to the anterior teeth might be possible.

 

 

Ken

 

I hadn't really noticed before ( I had to check a number of books that I have on extant sharks) that none of the 9 named extant Heterodontus species are presently found in the Atlantic Ocean (or the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico regions).  That is really interesting.

 

Unfortunately, I only have jaws of 2 of the 9 species, horn shark (Heterodontus francisci) and zebra bullhead shark  (Heterodontus zebra) and have not taken pictures of the teeth.  You really would need representative jaws from all 9 species to compare your tooth to.  You will not find many pictures of the teeth of the different extant Heterodontus species.  Remember unlike fossil shark species which were named based upon teeth, extant shark species were named based upon external characteristics like size, head shape, color, number of gills, number, shape, and location of fins etc.  Therefore most publications on the extant sharks, at best, give line drawings of a representative upper and lower tooth usually which are really useless for trying to distinguish species within a genus.  Some publications show poor pictures of actual upper and lower teeth.  Carcharhinus have a number of publications that show the upper and lower dentitions with line drawings that are a little more helpful in identifying Carcharhinus teeth to a species.  The problem even with these is the wide variation of tooth features within each Carcharhinus species and the overlap of similar tooth features among the different Carcharhinus species.

 

So you really would need to find a museum that had a really good collection of extant Heterodontus jaws of all or most of the 9 species to compare your tooth to.  You might check out the extant shark jaw collection at the Florida Museum of Natural History

 

 

Marco Sr.

 

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Hi,

 

I have an Heterodontus portusjacksoni jaw but I don't know if it is easy to do pic of teeth... Do you need it ?

 

Coco

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OUTIL POUR MESURER VOS FOSSILES : ici

Ma bibliothèque PDF 1 (Poissons et sélaciens récents & fossiles) : ici
Ma bibliothèque PDF 2 (Animaux vivants - sans poissons ni sélaciens) : ici
Mâchoires sélaciennes récentes : ici
Hétérodontiques et sélaciens : ici
Oeufs sélaciens récents : ici
Otolithes de poissons récents ! ici

Un Greg...

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Thanks, Coco--I really wanted to try to compare the tooth from Cookiecutter Creek with the nearest eastern Pacific species to see which it most resembles. Those candidates are: Californian Horn Shark (Heterodontus francisci), the Galapagos Bullhead Shark (Heterodontus quoyi), and the Mexican Hornshark (Heterodontus mexicanus) with H. mexicanus possibly having the closest present day distribution to Panama.

 

Given the post above from @Al Dente I started to do a bit more online searching and a simple search for "Heterodontus fossil" let to the Elasmo.com website with an interesting page on the genus:

 

http://www.elasmo.com/frameMe.html?file=genera/cenozoic/sharks/heterodontus.html&menu=bin/menu_genera-alt.html

 

From a quick read of the above web page it looks Heterodontus is known from the Late Cretaceous in the Gulf of Mexico (mainly further west around Texas). They appear a bit more recently in the Paleocene from both the Aquia Formation in Maryland and the Nanjemoy Formation in Virginia extending a bit more recently into the Eocene (Ypresian age) in the latter. Then there are reports from North Carolina in the Castle Hayne Formation (Eocene) particularly from Sequence 2 (Lutetian)--still some 42 Ma. It appears that after the Eocene the fossil record for this genus begins to disappear with the last known examples being from the Oligocene: Old Church Formation in Virginia and Trent Formation in North Carolina.

 

It is believed that the Cookiecutter Creek fossil shark teeth are coming from the Tamiami Formation (Late Miocene-Late Pliocene or approximately 13-2.6 Ma) so this would definitely be not only the first appearance in the Florida fossil record but the most recent fossil record for this genus (anywhere?) They are found quite commonly across the country at the famous middle Miocene formation at Shark Tooth Hill in Bakersfield (Round Mountain Silt Member of the Temblor Formation--roughly 16-15 Ma). I have many examples of both the anterior and lateral teeth from this genus from that locality (which is why I recognized this specimen when it popped out of the Cookiecutter Creek micro-matrix).

 

I love digging into things, investigating and learning incrementally more than I did the day before. Extra fun when that learning is triggered by a chance discovery.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

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4 hours ago, digit said:

From a quick read of the above web page it looks Heterodontus is known from the Late Cretaceous in the Gulf of Mexico (mainly further west around Texas). They appear a bit more recently in the Paleocene from both the Aquia Formation in Maryland and the Nanjemoy Formation in Virginia extending a bit more recently into the Eocene (Ypresian age) in the latter.

In case you are interested, here are a couple examples from the Cretaceous of North Carolina. Both are from the Peedee Formation. Probably Heterodontus granti.

Heterodontus granti posterior.jpg

Heterodontus granti.JPG

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Indeed. Quite gorgeous!

 

I've still got some additional Cookiecutter Creek micro-matrix in a bucket in my garage and I've just run a few plastic Solo cups through my stacked sifters. Going to take a relaxing break post-dinner to pick through some more of this magical micro-matrix. Would be stunning if I could pull an anterior Heterodontus tooth from this bucket. If I don't come upon any other rarities from this collection, I still know where the source is--it just takes 6 hours of driving and a few hours of digging and sifting to acquire some more. It was Tony's Scyliorhinidae tooth that rekindled interest in this micro-matrix. Now that I know there are at least two rare taxa to be found here, I'm re-energized to pick through more buckets of this stuff.

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

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4 hours ago, digit said:

Indeed. Quite gorgeous!

 

I've still got some additional Cookiecutter Creek micro-matrix in a bucket in my garage and I've just run a few plastic Solo cups through my stacked sifters. Going to take a relaxing break post-dinner to pick through some more of this magical micro-matrix. Would be stunning if I could pull an anterior Heterodontus tooth from this bucket. If I don't come upon any other rarities from this collection, I still know where the source is--it just takes 6 hours of driving and a few hours of digging and sifting to acquire some more. It was Tony's Scyliorhinidae tooth that rekindled interest in this micro-matrix. Now that I know there are at least two rare taxa to be found here, I'm re-energized to pick through more buckets of this stuff.

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

 

Hi Ken,

 

I looked for Tony's original post on that tooth and found it.  I must've been out-of-town when it was getting comments.  I just bumped it with my thoughts which are that it is a Triakis tooth as it is in the size range and follows the shape.  It even looks similar to the Sharktooth Hill Triakis.  Catshark teeth are almost always less than half the size of Tony's tooth with many being 1mm or less.  Triakis would be new to the Florida fossil record.  I don't think the genus lives in the region today.

 

I also see that I need to get back to you on a PM.  

 

Jess

 

 

 

 

 

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I don't know either of those shark families. I tend to learn about fossils in an incremental way by doing research into items as I come across them. As a result my knowledge of fossils tends to be highly personalized and somewhat random. Tony is going to send his tooth over to me and I'm going to deliver that tooth as well as my recent Heterodontus tooth to the FLMNH when I go up there soon.

 

Cheers.

 

 

-Ken

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