An early Miocene extinction in pelagic sharks

Abstract

Shark populations have been decimated in recent decades because of overfishing and other anthropogenic stressors; however, the long-term impacts of such changes in marine predator abundance and diversity are poorly constrained. We present evidence for a previously unknown major extinction event in sharks that occurred in the early Miocene, ~19 million years ago. During this interval, sharks virtually disappeared from open-ocean sediments, declining in abundance by >90% and morphological diversity by >70%, an event from which they never recovered. This abrupt extinction occurred independently from any known global climate event and ~2 million to 5 million years before diversifications in the highly migratory, large-bodied predators that dominate pelagic ecosystems today, indicating that the early Miocene was a period of rapid, transformative change for open-ocean ecosystems.