Thursday, March 28, 2024

Could Sharks Have Nearly Gone Extinct Millions Of Years Ago?

-

Sharks have been in the world’s oceans for millions of years, and apparently the decimation in their population in recent decades isn’t the first time it’s happened.

A new study published recently has found that the global shark population took a massive hit about 19 million years ago, nearly going extinct.

While scientists can’t quite pin down the cause of this near-extinction, they did find in sediment samples that the abundance of sharks declined by more than 70 percent during the early Miocene period.

The shark population that managed to survive and evolve over the next 2 to 5 million years after that event is only a tiny fraction of what the population used to be, according to the study in Science Magazine:

“There is no known climatic and/or environmental driver of this extinction, and its cause remains a mystery.”

Check out the study at sciencemag.org.

John Liang
John Lianghttps://www.deeperblue.com/
John Liang is the News Editor at DeeperBlue.com. He first got the diving bug while in High School in Cairo, Egypt, where he earned his PADI Open Water Diver certification in the Red Sea off the Sinai Peninsula. Since then, John has dived in a volcanic lake in Guatemala, among white-tipped sharks off the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, and other places including a pool in Las Vegas helping to break the world record for the largest underwater press conference.

SEARCH

CONNECT WITH US

858,282FansLike
108,963FollowersFollow
2,738FollowersFollow
22,801FollowersFollow
13,177FollowersFollow
25,921FollowersFollow
2,531SubscribersSubscribe

RECENT ARTICLES