Back to the weird shark thing, I’ve settled on using the Stethacanthus in the crinoid painting, a pair of them in that Pennsylvanian-era Oklahoma ocean. It’s not the weirdest fish in the sea, just one of the weirdest. It has a fairly normal mouth rather than a toothy spiral projection, but the top of it’s head has a “brush” of sharp denticles sticking up on a raised platform. Mystifying. There’s a touch of Starship Enterprise in there, just a touch.

And just to make my day even better, Kyle, the vertebrate paleontologist, at Sam Noble, sent me a wondrous link to a really weird shark video from Japan.