A brand new paper says an enormous salmon that lived 5 million years in the past within the coastal waters of the Pacific Northwest used tusk-like spikes as protection mechanisms and for constructing nests to spawn.
The preliminary fossil discoveries of the two.7-metre-long salmon in Oregon within the Nineteen Seventies had been incomplete and led researchers to recommend the fish had fang-like tooth.
The now-extinct fish was dubbed the “saber-tooth salmon,” however the examine revealed within the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One as we speak renames it the “spike-toothed salmon” and says each men and women possessed the “multifunctional” function.
Examine co-author Edward Davis says the revelation concerning the tusk-like tooth got here after the invention of fossilized skulls at a web site in Oregon in 2014.
Davis, an affiliate professor within the division of earth sciences on the College of Oregon, says he was stunned to see the skulls had “sideways tooth.”
Opposite to the idea because the Nineteen Seventies, he says the tooth could not have been used for any type of biting.
“That was positively a stunning second,” Davis says of the fossil discovery in 2014. “I spotted that all the art work and all the publicity supplies … we had simply made two months prior, for the brand new exhibit, had been all outdated.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first revealed April 24, 2024.
