EXPERTS at Weymouth Sea Life Park are being called upon to help scientists unravel the mysteries of the ancient seas – through shark teeth.
As the attraction at Lodmoor Country Park prepares to mark European Shark Week from October 15-23, a research project has been announced that will help marine conservation.
Researchers believe clues to marine biological diversity over millions of years may be locked up in sharks’ teeth.
Oxygen isotopes, which are incorporated into sharks’ teeth as they develop can reveal the temperature of the seawater the shark lived in at the time.
So Sealife staff including Tom Prakash are being asked to collect discarded shark teeth from the beds of their ocean tanks and send them to the University of Birmingham along with regular water samples from their tanks.
Weymouth Sea Life Park is home to some Bonnethead sharks.
The creatures are the smallest relative of the hammerhead shark. Instead of a hammershape their heads are more mallet-shaped and its snout is broadly rounded, resembling a shovel.
They found a comfortable home in Shark Reef this year, with other sharks and fish.
Research head Dr Ivan Sansom, a Senior Lecturer in Palaeobiology at the University of Birmingham, said the project may validate the study of age-old fossil shark teeth as a technique to learn more about sea conditions in prehistoric times.
Dr Sansom added: “Other work in the field has suggested that cooling waters were a factor in driving major evolutionary changes, whilst warming waters led to extinctions.
“With the current evidence for warming oceans the evidence from the past suggests we are going to see a major extinction in our oceans.
“Reconstructing past climate systems using evidence such as that we hope to find in shark teeth may help us understand what happened in the past, and what may happen in the future.”
The initial research (funded by the EU’s Marie Curie Fellowship scheme) involving teeth collected from the bed of Sea Life Centre ocean tanks will take two years to complete.
Dr Sansom said the work with shark teeth might later be extended to include studying deposits in the ear-bones of fish, which can also reveal details of water chemistry.
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