Of all the vexing fossil mysteries that have confounded paleontologists, few have been as persistent as that of Helicoprion – the name given to petrified whorls of elongate teeth that look like 270 ...

A study in the Journal of Morphology shows how the bizarre prehistoric ratfish called a Helicoprion ate with its unique set of choppers. A Helicoprion was a prehistoric ratfish that featured perhaps ...

A 25ft monster 'shark' with chainsaw teeth that roamed the prehistoric seas 270 million years ago has been revealed by scientists. The bizarre fish Helicoprion, an early ancestor of sharks, had a ...

The world’s only animal, past or present, with a complete 360-degree spiral of teeth was Helicoprion, which sliced into prey like a buzzsaw. This sharklike fish, which lived 270 million years ago, is ...

An ancient sea predator had a spiraling whorl of teeth that acted as a lethal slicing tool, according to new scans of a mysterious fossil. Helicoprion was a bizarre creature that went extinct some 225 ...

A rare fossil of a prehistoric monster-fish's spiral of chainsaw-like teeth has been found in Russia. The scary Helicoprion was an extinct ancestor of the modern-day ghost shark or ratfish with an ...

Helicoprion had saws for jaws. That’s really all there was to the 270 million year old ratfish’s dental cutlery. No upper teeth or anything else to slice against – just an ever-growing whorl of spiky ...

Reconstructing the anatomy of prehistoric sharks isn't easy. With few exceptions - an exquisitely-preserved body fossil here, some calcified bits of skeleton there - teeth make up the majority of the ...

An illustration of the ancient shark Edestus heinrichi preying on a fish. Many ancient sharks had different jaws than modern sharks. Jesse Pruitt and Evelyn Vollmer, Idaho Virtualization Lab Imagine a ...

Jacob Kastrenakes is The Verge’s executive editor. He has covered tech, policy, and online creators for over a decade. The fossil that Tapanila’s team analyzed had 117 teeth, though all but a dozen ...