From these jawed fish evolved land vertebrates
Perhaps the most iconic jaws in cinema are those of the shark in Steven Spielberg’s eponymous 1975 film Jaws. Now Chinese paleontologists have found, in the fossils of a small shark-like fish, the “prequel” to all jaws on Earth. The fossils, which are almost 439 million years old and were discovered in Guizhou Province in southern China, feature the oldest jaws ever found on our planet.
The fish fossils Fanjingshania, 15 cm long, which come from an ancient ancestor of sharks that lived in the Paleozoic period, surprised scientists because of their antiquity. The discovery pushes back the fish with the oldest known jaws by about 15 million years. The previous holder of the oldest jaw record was a 425 million year old fish.
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the British University of Birmingham made the relevant publication in the journal Nature. “New fossils change everything. This is the oldest known anatomically jawed fish,” said lead researcher Prof Chu Min of the Academy’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.
Today, humans and almost all vertebrates (99.8%) have jaws that help them eat. Fish appeared on Earth about 520 million years ago, and for a long time they did not have jaws. Previously the seas were dominated by sea scorpions up to 2.5 meters long, but the gradual evolution of jaws in fish and the increase in their size turned them into rulers of the seas. Eventually, land vertebrates evolved from these jawed fish.
Jaws were one of the most important evolutionary innovations. As Swedish palaeontologist Per Alberg of Uppsala University stated, “jaws are important because they allowed vertebrates to become active predators for the first time.”
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