On the friday of my last week of summer, I picked my girlfriend up from the SFO airport and we booked it to Golden Gate Park, where the prestigious California Academy of Sciences resides. Over the last five years their collections have been at their temporary facility near the Metreon. I visited several years ago (2007?) to look at northern fur seal skeletons. For my SVP presentation, I needed to compare my partial fossil Globicephala cranium with modern Globicephala, just to make sure my ID was correct. After I finished making my comparisons (and confirming my ID), I started photographing other marine mammal parts, and came across a box marked "Enhydra lutris nereis, with shark tooth!" E. L. nereis is the southern sea otter, which used to live from British Columbia south to Mexico; they were declared extinct, and have since repopulated, but only along Central California, and very slowly.
I pulled this skull out, and sure as s*** there was a tiny piece of a Carcharodon carcharias tooth embedded in the skull near the temporal/occipital contact or lambdoidal crest.
This skull was actually described and figured by Ames and Morejohn (1980), who described multiple cases of sea otter carcasses bearing tell tale bite marks in soft tissue, as well as two different bite morphologies: linear gouges, and parallel scrapes, originating from the serrations being dragged across the bone surface. They also figured about a dozen tooth fragments that had broken off and were embedded in soft tissue, and in some cases, skeletal tissue like this specimen.
Here's a closeup picture, and you can clearly see the serrations that diagnose Carcharodon carcharias.
Ames, J. A. and G. V. Morejohn. 1980, Evidence of white shark, Carcharodon carcharius, attacks on sea otters, Enhydra lutris: California Fish and Game, v. 66, p. 196-209.
I pulled this skull out, and sure as s*** there was a tiny piece of a Carcharodon carcharias tooth embedded in the skull near the temporal/occipital contact or lambdoidal crest.
This skull was actually described and figured by Ames and Morejohn (1980), who described multiple cases of sea otter carcasses bearing tell tale bite marks in soft tissue, as well as two different bite morphologies: linear gouges, and parallel scrapes, originating from the serrations being dragged across the bone surface. They also figured about a dozen tooth fragments that had broken off and were embedded in soft tissue, and in some cases, skeletal tissue like this specimen.
Here's a closeup picture, and you can clearly see the serrations that diagnose Carcharodon carcharias.
