Odontaspis molassica (Probst, 1879a)

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 : 32

Odontaspis molassica (Probst, 1879a)

Tooth type: Tearing.

As already mentioned, there are two recent species of Odontaspis , O. noronhai and O. ferox ; the teeth of the latter are most similar to O. molassica (Bass et al., 1975; Pfeil, 1991). According to Pfeil (1991), O. molassica is the ancestor of O. ferox (Risso, 1810) . The latter species feeds on small bony fishes, including rockfish, as well as squid and shrimp, living between 10 and 1015 m depth (Ebert et al., 2021) and having a TL value of 4.2 ±0.56 (Froese and Pauly, 2019). Odontaspis ferox has a cosmopolitan distribution across warm-temperate and tropical waters, and although it is essentially demersal, it has also been captured pelagically in the mid-ocean (Fergusson et al., 2008).