The remains of a possible 18-foot-long shark that used to roam the campus 85 million years ago was found by junior Lillia Blasius during a fossil dig for her Advanced Placement (AP) Biology class on Jan. 24.

“We started digging where no students were and literally just stumbled upon the tooth,” senior Ashley Chanpong said. “It was peeking out of the surface and she saw the tooth shape and picked it up.”

Blasius and Chanpong were at first told the bone belonged to a chicken, but they were surprised when they found out their fossil find belonged to a massive 85-million-year-old shark.

“I was excited, but at first my teacher said it was a chicken bone,” Blasius said. “I knew it looked like a shark tooth so I asked the other biology teacher, Mr. Kirpach, and he said it was definitely a shark tooth.”

Fossil hunting on campus has been successful and while there have been similar finds to Blasius’s, they were not quite as rare. The tooth adds to West’s fossil collection from this creek and will be added to the faunal list record of fossil locality used by researchers at Southern Methodist University (SMU).

“The shark tooth was big enough to belong to the species Cretoxyrhina mantelli, or the ‘Ginsu’ shark,” AP Biology teacher Wesley Kirpach said. “These sharks are bigger than today’s Great White that are usually 14 to 15 feet long.”
The biology classes have been studying evolution and using this hands-on activity to explore the backyard of the school and see real examples of it. The creek bend that students pass every day while walking to their cars has oyster shells, shark teeth, bones and scales and a multitude of different fossils.

“The first chapter in the textbook about evolution is the type of evidence that are used to support the theory of evolution, and the fossil record is the first major observation of evolution so we went hunting for fossils,” another AP Biology teacher Heidi Roop-Morland said.

Blasius and her classmates used what they have learned in biology to discover something from millions of years ago. It was more than a book, teacher or powerpoint could ever show students.

“The fossils give us examples from different time periods, and how different characteristics were useful or which ones weren’t important so the organism got rid of them,” Blasius said. “It shows how these organisms have evolved and it also teaches us about the environment that they were living in.”

AP Biology has encouraged this activity for several years now, and teachers see how interested the students become while going out to the creek.
“It seems to generate enthusiasm for the unit,” Roop-Morland said. “They get to see science happening right then and there.”