1667: Nicolas Steno dissects the head of a shark and publishes his findings [129]

Art Piece: Youth Saved from a Shark, Valentine Green after John Singleton Copley, 1779 [191]

Paper: Tooth morphology elucidates shark evolution across the end-Cretaceous mass extinction [185]

Steno’s contributions were very important to the future establishment of archaeology as a field, and his findings were valuable in informing understanding of what fossils were during his time. Notably, though Steno had different professions during his lifetime, he gained prominence when he dissected a shark caught by two fishermen in 1666 [129]). Previously, the origins of shark teeth were a mystery to many, though today the answer to where shark teeth come from may seem obvious. When fossilized shark teeth were first identified in rocks, some people, like Pliny the Elder, suggested [130] that the objects were actually meteorites that rained down from the heavens during lunar eclipses; in the Middle Ages, many believed that fossilized shark teeth were actually serpent tongues that were turned to stone by St. Paul. Steno’s work elucidated the actual nature of these shark teeth, and turned objects which were once heavily mythologized into objects which were rather more grounded in reality. After dissecting the shark and noticing similarities between the fossilized shark teeth and the ones he had observed from the dissected shark, Steno suggested [129] that the fossilized shark teeth actually may have belonged to once-living animals. After Steno published illustrations of the teeth, it then gave many people much more insight into what fossils were, and how we can still have remains of organisms that lived long ago through fossils. This represented a paradigm shift because Steno’s work helped to usher in a greater understanding of fossils and palentology, influencing others’ work in the future, as well. Though the artwork above [191] was created after Steno’s time and is not directly about Steno, it is still very representative of his work in many ways. Notably, the image depicts a youth being saved from a shark attack, as the name of the piece suggests. This can be representative of Steno actually being the people who are saving the youth, while society could be represented by the youth about to be eaten. Steno in a way “saved” society from maintaining this false understanding of the fossilized shark teeth, allowing people to instead understand their true nature. The artwork is full of depth and drama — although Steno’s work may not have been as dramatic as the scene we see here, his work definitely had a significant amount of depth, as it allowed the paradigm around fossils to shift. The scientific paper above [185] also discusses shark tooth morphology as a way to allow us better insight into shark evolution. It’s fascinating that sharks have persisted evolutionarily for so long, and that their teeth (which they often lose) are great [160] ways to analyze their species-specific evolution. Though Steno did not use these fossilized shark teeth to explore their evolution as this paper essentially does, perhaps with the scientific tools of today, he might have been able to. Thanks to the paradigm shift facilitated by Steno, papers like this are possible, and give us key insights into shark evolution.