A sample of late Viséan limestone from the Włodawa IG-4 borehole, east of Lublin, Poland, yielded a piece of a tooth and a few hundred well-preserved scales comparable to those of “Ctenacanthus” costellatus Traquair, 1884 from Glencartholm, Scotland, UK. Most of the scales are typical compound body scales of the ctenacanthid type. Their crowns are composed of several separate odontodes whose distal ends are turned backwards and bases are characterised by concave undersides. In the material, there are also sparse scales with similar crowns but with flat or convex bulbous bases, as well as ornamented plates and single, star-like denticles, probably from the head region. The taxonomic status of “Ctenacanthus” costellatus was analysed and a new generic name for that species, viz. Glencartius gen. nov., is proposed.
This is a short report about the first Cenozoic shark fossil from Svalbard. The specimen derives from the late Paleocene greenish sandstone of the Grumantbyen Formation, which is exposed in Fossildalen on the western side of Colesbukta on Spitsbergen. The single tooth is assigned to the Paleogene sand tiger shark genus Striatolamia that also is known from other polar regions. The Fossildalen specimen represents the northernmost Paleogene shark record, and is the second reported body fossil of a vertebrate from the Cenozoic of Spitsbergen.
The new rich collection of fossil fish remains obtained during the Polish Spitsbergen Expedition of 1998 includes many isolated shark teeth, mostly of the genera Lissodus, Hybodus and Acrodus. The shark microfossils from the Hornsund area (South Spitsbergen) described here and the analysis of the histology of Lissodus teeth contribute to a better understanding of the previously described Early Triassic fish fauna from that region (Birkenmajer and Jerzmańska 1979). There is the evidence for coexistence of two types of histology within a single taxon what closes the discussion considering ortho- and osteodentine as a taxonomic factor.