Name: Wynter's review of Resurrecting the Shark by Susan Ewing
Item: Resurrecting the Shark
Rating: 3
Author: Wynter

Susan Ewing

A prehistoric mystery. A fossil so mesmerizing that it boggled the minds of scientists for more than a century—until a motley crew of modern day shark fanatics decided to try to bring the monster-predator back to life. In 1993, Alaskan artist and paleo-shark enthusiast Ray Troll stumbled upon the weirdest fossil he had ever seen—a platter-sized spiral of tightly wound shark teeth. This chance encounter in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County sparked Troll’s obsession with Helicoprion, a mysterious monster from deep time. In 2010, tattooed undergraduate student and returning Iraq War veteran Jesse Pruitt became seriously smitten with a Helicoprion fossil in a museum basement in Idaho. These two bizarre-shark disciples found each other, and an unconventional band of collaborators grew serendipitously around them, determined to solve the puzzle of the mysterious tooth whorl once and for all. Helicoprion was a Paleozoic chondrichthyan about the size of a modern great white shark, with a circular saw of teeth centered in its lower jaw—a feature unseen in the shark world before or since. For some ten million years, long before the Age of Dinosaurs, Helicoprion patrolled the shallow seas around the supercontinent Pangaea as the apex predator of its time. Just a few tumultuous years after Pruitt and Troll met, imagination, passion, scientific process, and state-of-the-art technology merged into an unstoppable force that reanimated the remarkable creature—and made important new discoveries. In this groundbreaking book, Susan Ewing reveals these revolutionary insights into what Helicoprion looked like and how the tooth whorl functioned—pushing this dazzling and awe-inspiring beast into the spotlight of modern science.

Resurrecting the Shark

Wynter

It's so incredibly hard to find quality popular science literature on palaeontology; but paleoichthyology - forget about it. Books on ancient fish are harder to find than a fossilised shark skeleton. That's why I was incredibly excited about finding this gem - not just a book about Paleozoic sharks, but one that specifically focuses on the mysterious helicoprion, whose teeth formed a strange whorl formation, puzzling scientists for over a hundred years. While I applaud the author on taking a noble task of bringing the obscure subject to light, I wish I enjoyed the writing more. It was simply too dense for a non-specialist and drowned a bit in the biographical narrative of all scientists involved. I simply found myself zoning out too much, and it's a shame, because the sharks themselves are fascinating.

Lewis John Fisher

As a boy, there was nothing more than I wanted to do than become a paleontologist - I blame copious rewatching of the original (and undisputed best version) of Walking with Dinosaurs. It's been a while since I felt that level of passion rekindle, and I cannot thank Susan Ewing enough for that. This is a fantastic book, both in terms of a niche history while also as an exciting look into the notorious buzz-saw shark. It's just a lovely book all around honestly. If paleontology was more of a viable option in Australia, I would seriously consider undertaking studies. Alas, I'll stick with reading about it for now

Wynter &
Resurrecting the Shark by Susan Ewing

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Wynter &Resurrecting the Shark by Susan Ewing

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Wynter &
Resurrecting the Shark by Susan Ewing