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A prehistoric mystery. A fossil so mesmerizing that it boggled the minds of scientists for more than a century -- until a motley crew of modern day shark fanatics decided to try to bring the monster-predator back to life.In 1993, Alaskan artist and paleo-shark enthusiast Ray Troll stumbled upon the weirdest fossil he had ever seen -- a platter-sized spiral of tightly wound shark teeth. This chance encounter in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County sparked Troll's obsession with Helicoprion, a mysterious monster from deep time.In 2010, tattooed undergraduate student and returning Iraq War veteran Jesse Pruitt became seriously smitten with a Helicoprion fossil in a museum basement in Idaho. These two bizarre-shark disciples found each other, and an unconventional band of collaborators grew serendipitously around them, determined to solve the puzzle of the mysterious tooth whorl once and for all.Helicoprion was a Paleozoic chondrichthyan about the size of a modern great white shark, with a circular saw of teeth centered in its lower jaw -- a feature unseen in the shark world before or since. For some ten million years, long before the Age of Dinosaurs, Helicoprion patrolled the shallow seas around the supercontinent Pangaea as the apex predator of its time.Just a few tumultuous years after Pruitt and Troll met, imagination, passion, scientific process, and state-of-the-art technology merged into an unstoppable force that reanimated the remarkable creature -- and made important new discoveries.In this groundbreaking book, Susan Ewing reveals these revolutionary insights into what Helicoprion looked like and how the tooth whorl functioned -- pushing this dazzling and awe-inspiring beast into the spotlight of modern science. 24 pages of color illustrations



About the Author

Susan Ewing

My two greatest joys as a kid were riding my bike and reading books. Both offered escape and adventure - my bike took me flying out into the physical world, while books were the bridge to an inner world of emotion and ideas. I came to writing as way to hold the physical world like a bird in my hands, so I could see more clearly, feel more deeply, and understand more completely. And because in those moments when writing works, it's magic. I was born and raised in Kentucky, but wandered west soon after graduating high school. I lived in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest for many years, rotating through a variety of jobs, like working as a bull cook in the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay, commercial salmon fishing in Southeast Alaska, staking mining claims for a geophysical company in the Brooks Range, working in a print shop, and waitressing. Then I got a job as an wildlife information officer, and started writing as part of the job. Something clicked. I loved it. Soon after that I wrote my first book, I was the kid on the bike - thrilled and committed to the ride. Somewhere in all that I finished my much-interrupted education and graduated with a BA from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. In 1991, I moved to the Gallatin Valley of Montana, which felt like home as soon as I saw the Bridger Mountains on the horizon. My life is at its sweetest equilibrium when I'm out hiking in those mountains with my husband and my dog.



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