Sphyrna laevissima (Cope, 1867)

Höltke, Olaf, Salvador, Rodrigo B. & Rasser, Michael W., 2023, Trophic relationships in the Early Miocene Upper Marine Molasse of Baden-Württemberg, Southwest Germany, with special emphasis on the elasmobranch fauna, Palaeontologia Electronica (a 46) 26 (3), pp. 1-38 : 36-37

Sphyrna laevissima (Cope, 1867)

Tooth type: Cutting-clutching.

In light of tooth morphology, the recent species that is closest to S. laevissima is S. zygaena (Linnaeus, 1758) . Because of such similarity, Purdy et al. (2001) placed S. laevissima in synonymy with S. zygaena , but Reinecke et al. (2011) demonstrated that these two taxa are indeed different. Sphyrna zyganea feeds mainly on cephalopods, followed by bony fishes, and has a TL of 4.2 (Cortés, 1999). It lives on coastal to offshore waters, from the surface to 200 m deep, possibly also down to 500 m deep (Ebert et al., 2021).

ORDER INCERTAE SEDIS

Family Megascyliorhinidae Pfeil, 1984

Genus Megascyliorhinus Cappetta and Ward 1977

Megascyliorhinus miocaenicus (Antunes and Jonet, 1970)

Tooth type: Clutching.

The genus as well as the family are extinct. A discussion about this species can be found in Manganelli and Spadini (2019). The teeth show odontological analogies to the Scyliorhinidae . See Pachyscyllium dachiardii above for details.

ORDER RAJIFORMES Berg, 1940

Family Rhinidae Müller and Henle, 1841

Genus Rhynchobatus Müller and Henle, 1837

Rhynchobatus pristinus (Probst, 1877)

Tooth type: Crushing.

All eight extant species of Rhynchobatus live in shallow water down to 70 m depth and they all feature bony fishes and invertebrates in their diet (Froese and Pauly, 2019). Apart from one species with a TL of 4.5, all the others range from 3.4 to 3.6 in TL (Froese and Pauly, 2019).