Fossilized shark jaws found beneath Egypt’s desert reveal a lost kingdom that once ruled a vanished tropical sea
The Egyptian Western Desert doesn’t invite imagination. It bakes. It blinds. It has looked, more or less, like the end of the world for as long as most people can conceive.
But beneath the Abu-Tartur plateau, paleontologists weren’t finding ancient stillness. They were finding teeth — fossilized, scattered through the rock like evidence of something that once ruled here, long before “here” was desert at all.
A sea where the desert stands
During the Cretaceous period — between 66 and 145 million years ago — the landscape now scorched into Egypt’s Western Desert was something unrecognizable. Much of Northern Africa lay submerged beneath a warm, shallow tropical sea. No dunes. No horizon-bleaching heat. Just water, teeming with life.
The climate driving that world looked nothing like ours. The Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse pushed global temperatures anywhere from 6 to 14 °C higher than today. Polar ice was either rare or entirely absent. Conditions like these didn’t just permit marine life — they amplified it.
The Abu-Tartur plateau sat at the heart of this ancient seafloor. Today it’s a mesa of pale rock in Egypt’s Western Desert. Millions of years ago, it lay submerged beneath nutrient-rich waters fed by phosphorite deposits — rocks high in phosphate minerals that triggered intense upwellings from the seafloor to the surface. Those upwellings fueled plankton blooms, which fed small fish and invertebrates, which fed larger predators. A full food web, stacked and thriving, in a place that now gets almost no rain.
Five new species emerge from the rock
Paleontologist Tarek Yassin of Cairo University and his team excavated the Duwi Formation at Abu-Tartur, sifting through what was once that ancient seafloor. What they recovered were teeth — dozens of them, embedded in phosphorite rock, belonging to species no one had previously recorded at this site.
Five newly identified species emerged from the study: Cretalamna maroccana, Scapanorhynchus raphiodon, Serratolamna serrata, Squalicorax bassanii, and Squalicorax pristodontus. Combined with two species already known from the region, the total count of prehistoric shark species identified in this area rose to seven.
One find stood out even among the five. S. raphiodon had never before been documented in prehistoric Egyptian waters, and the specimen Yassin’s team recovered may also be the youngest known example of that species anywhere in the fossil record.
A gallery of ancient teeth
The teeth themselves tell the story before the science does. They range in color from sandy yellows and warm browns to deep gray and near-black, stained by millions of years inside Egyptian rock. In shape, they resemble a scattered collection of daggers — some broad and short, others long and slender, curved or straight, edges smooth or serrated depending on the species.
S. raphiodon carried teeth that looked almost delicate: long, narrow, pointed — not unlike vampire fangs. The shark itself was relatively small, which makes the dramatic proportions of those teeth all the more striking.
S. serrata had shorter, sharply pointed teeth set in asymmetrical roots. Geographically, it was a widespread species — tooth fossils have surfaced across Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and both North and South America. S. bassanii bore heavily serrated teeth, while S. pristodontus had broader, flatter ones — still serrated, still dangerous — with fossils found as far as Jordan, Morocco, and Palestine.
Hunters carved into different niches
The variety of tooth shapes isn’t just visually striking — it carries ecological meaning. Different tooth morphologies suggest these sharks weren’t simply competing for identical prey. Each design points toward a distinct hunting strategy and, likely, a distinct place in the food web.
Some species may have coexisted simultaneously in these shallow tropical waters. Others were probably separated by time, appearing at different stratigraphic layers within the rock. The phosphorite environment supported a layered ecosystem regardless: small fish and invertebrates at the base, mid-level predators above them, and apex predators — including marine reptiles — at the top.
Not every classification is settled. C. maroccana, for instance, had curved teeth so similar to its relative Cretalamna biauriculata that researchers are still debating whether it represents a genuinely distinct species or simply a morphological variation of the same one. The fossil record rarely offers clean answers.
What the desert is still hiding
Abu-Tartur is not a protected excavation site. It’s an active phosphate mine, and heavy machinery has already fractured many of the specimens embedded in its rock. The scientific record of this ancient sea is being broken apart before it can be fully read.
Yassin has noted that the plateau holds one of the most diverse assemblages of shark tooth fossils in all of Egypt — diversity that suggests further discoveries are likely, if the rock survives long enough to yield them.
The findings, Yassin said, shed new light on the paleodiversity, chronology, and paleoenvironmental context of lamniform sharks in Late Cretaceous North Africa. That lineage didn’t disappear when the sea did. Today’s mackerel sharks are descended from lamniform ancestors, meaning the same evolutionary line that once ruled a tropical sea beneath the Sahara still cuts through modern oceans.
There’s something worth sitting with in that fact. The desert feels permanent. It isn’t. The sea felt permanent too. Five shark species, millions of years of silence, and a phosphate mine — all of it a reminder that what looks like the end of the world is usually just a chapter between two others we haven’t read yet.
You can learn more about this discovery here: Yassin, T., Carrillo-Briceño, J. D., Kindlimann, R., Ibrahim, A., & AbdelGawad, M. K. (2026). Egyptian shark graveyard: New Late Cretaceous Lamniform shark Assemblage from Duwi Formation of Abu-Tartur Area, Southwestern desert, Egypt. Cretaceous Research, 106476.
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