Resurrecting the Shark
A Scientific Obsession and the Mavericks Who Solved the Mystery of a 270-Million-Year-Old Fossil

Pegasus Books, 2017

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Rummaging around in the basement of a natural history museum in 1993, Alaskan artist and paleo-fish enthusiast Ray Troll stumbled on the most bizarre and puzzling fossil he had ever seen—a platter-sized spiral of tightly wound shark teeth. He became obsessed with the fossil and the mysterious beast it belonged to, Helicoprion.

 

In 2010, tattooed undergraduate student and Iraq War veteran Jesse Pruitt was similarly smitten with a Helicoprion fossil in a different museum basement. Pruitt tracked down Troll, and an unconventional band of collaborators grew around them, determined to solve the mystery of Helicoprion’s tooth whorl once and for all. Imagination, passion, scientific process, and state-of-the-art technology reanimated the remarkable creature, and fresh research shed new light on this apex predator of the Permian period.

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