POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

Each year, “Shark Week” marks the persistently popular, binge recycling of the films in the Jaws franchise and several dozen documentaries about how sharks mercilessly hunt seals and other prey. (As if to balance out the carnage inflicted upon the seals, in one documentary a Great White is ambushed and killed almost instantly by a Killer Whale.) Newspapers and periodicals mark “Shark Week” (as if it is actually a thing) by reminding us that relatively few people are killed by sharks each year, and environmental organizations again present the manifold, graphic evidence that we are a much bigger threat to sharks than sharks are to us.

Since my previous post today was related to research in the humanities, let me give  scientific research some equal time.

In January of this year—all out of sync with “Shark Week”–Science published an item reporting that sharks and humans shared common ancestor 440 million years ago:

A basking shark-like fish–only the size of a sardine–is helping paleontologists better understand the earliest branches of the vertebrate family tree. The fish’s 385 million-year-old remains suggest sharks and humans shared a common ancestor 440 million years ago.

 The shark, named Gladbachus adentatus, was first discovered in Germany in 2001. But it wasn’t until recently that, with the help of modern technology, scientists began to understand what they were looking at.

The specimen was found flattened and preserved in resin. The shark’s exoskeleton, including its cranium, cartilage and gill details, were all neatly preserved, but its compressed state made it difficult to decipher what exactly the shark looked like.

Improved CT scanning technologies helped researchers recreate the shark in 3D.

“Gladbachus was not your typical shark,” Katharine Criswell, a zoologist and research fellow at the University of Cambridge, told UPI. “It was almost a meter long and had a large and broad head with very tiny teeth, suggesting it was a suspension feeder similar to modern basking sharks.” . . .

The vertebrate lineage that began with bony fishes eventually spawned mammals, including humans. Sharks, which utilize more cartilage than bone, split off and formed a separate branch. But with few fossils of early sharks or shark-like fish, scientists have struggled to pinpoint the split.

 Thanks to Gladbachus, scientists are starting to nail down the timing of early vertebrate evolution.

This news item was accompanied by this image:

The basking shark is not at all as fierce as a Great White. It is, instead, a relatively docile and slow moving, if gigantic, creature that is much easier to like. I don’t wish to make any assertions that might be misunderstood and create a backlash among my own relatives, but I have to admit that the longer that I have looked at the photo, the more that I have had a sense of familial recognition and have felt a certain kinship. But I seem to have grown slower and larger, my teeth have gradually worn down, and my wife sometimes asks if I just inhaled a meal. Moreover, the basking shark has the smallest weight-for-weight brain size of any shark, and I am fairly certain that, given how long I have now been at the same university, that “secret” about me has pretty much become common knowledge. Lastly, although I am not sure that I have ever actually done it, the idea of basking is very appealing to me.

But since you have already indulged me on these eccentric personal musings, I hope that you will indulge me a little further as I propose an analogy that may be more provocative and broadly applicable.

In our politically polarized times, we regard those at the other end of the ideological spectrum as if they are Great White Sharks, sinister figures that are bent on our destruction. And some of them surely are. And if they themselves get blindsided by Killer Whales or dragged out of the depths by the figurative descendants of Quint, we should not feel any sorrow whatsoever at their gruesome demise.

But a lot of those at the other end of the ideological spectrum are, inexplicably, our relatives, friends, and neighbors—members of our communities. So thinking of them as basking sharks may help to put things in some perspective. Because they are so manifestly different than us, we’re never going to be entirely comfortable around them, nor should we be. But, as long as we are not overly aggressive about it, we can probably maneuver them in a direction that we would like—especially if we make certain that there is plenty of plankton along the way.

P.S. Since there has been much longstanding resistance to the idea that we are descended from and related to other species of apes, I wonder how those people would respond to the idea that we are descended from sharks. I suspect that the popularity of Shark Tank means that the popularity of “Shark Week” is at least somewhat based on our identification with the sharks that we ostensibly fear the most.

The complete article in Science s available at: upi.com/Science_News/Blog/2018/01/12/Sharks-humans-shared-common-ancestor-440-million-years-ago/6761515687452/.