This is the third or so time its happened in six years. A shark has been rained upon by a beam of God's golden seed and has given birth without aid of a real boy-shark. The first time, in 2002, it was a spotted bamboo shark, and in 2007 an isolated hammerhead had a pup--only to have it killed hours later by a stingray in the tank. This time it was a white-tipped reef shark in a tank in Nyiregyahaza Centre in Hungary.
It's easy to marvel at the rapid advance of CGI monsters in movies and wonder exactly how far off Industrial Light & Magic or WETA is from achieving utter realism. Then you look at one of nature's deep-sea monsters and realize just how far Hollywood has to go:
Like a biologically gruesome version of those Russian nesting dolls, researchers found a fossil of a prehistoric shark that ate an amphibian, which in turn had just eaten a fish. All three were preserved in what's being described as one of the first "food-chain" fossils ever discovered, adding further proof to the fact that all those cutesy drawings of big fish eating little fish eating littler fish you saw in childhood had a cold-blooded real-life analogue.
Continue reading 'It's a shark-eat-frog-eat-fish world: First food-chain fossil discovered' >
