New fossil reveals the weird ‘tooth cushions’ of an apex predator from 425 million years ago

By Brian Choo, Postdoctoral Fellow in Vertebrate Palaeontology, Flinders University
Jing Lu, PhD Candidate, Evolutionary Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Roughly 425 million years ago, in the warm seas over what is now southern China, there lived a metre-long bony fish with jaws full of clusters of spiky teeth.

Long extinct, this predatory fish (Megamastax amblyodus) was an ancient forerunner of all animals with a skeleton and a backbone alive today – including you and me – and was the world’s oldest known vertebrate apex predator that lived at the top of the food chain in its environment.

In a new paper published in Nature today, we report…

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