November 1966 



COMMERCIAL FISHERIES REVIEW 



29 



Timothy Furtado, a fisherman aboard the com- 

 mercial dragger Explorer , September 14, 

 1964, from the northeastern part of Georges 

 Bank--42°02' north latitude and 67027' west 

 longitude. Water depth here is 20 fathoms(120 

 feet). 



This tooth is from the giant shark, Car - 

 charodon megalodon , now extinct. These 

 sharks, voracious predators, lived during the 

 Miocene Epoch, about 20 million years ago, 

 and were 40 to 50 feet long. They are close 

 relatives of the Maneater Shark (White Shark) 

 now common in tropical and temperate seas. 



The tooth has a generally smooth surface 

 with a minutely serrated cutting edge. It is 

 light brown along the distal margins, grading 

 to dark brown and black in the central and basal 

 portions of both inner and outer faces. The 

 inner face is very slightly concave; the outer 

 face is slightly convex. Original compounds of 

 which the tooth was formed have been phos- 

 phatized, and a phosphorite concretion is at- 



tached to the tooth's base. The concretion is 

 only of moderate size at the base and inner 

 face, but on the outer face it extends more than 

 half way from base to apex. 



SALT-MARSH PEAT 



One of the largest samples dredged from 

 the oceanbottom and brought infor identifica- 

 tion consisted of several chunks of salt-marsh 

 peat (fig. 3) found by Norman Lepire, skipper 

 of the Ruth Lea, a scalloper operating out of 

 New Bedford, Mass. Several bushels of peat 

 were dredged during fishing for sea scallops 

 ( Placopecten magellanicus ) at a depth of 32 

 fathoms (192 feet) east of Massachusetts along 

 the western end of Georges Bank, one of New 

 England's most famous fishing grounds. Lo- 

 cation of the peat deposit, determined from 

 Loran-A bearings, is 4 1^09. 3' north latitude 

 and 68O43.2' west longitude, whichplaces it at 

 the northern end of a large submarine sand 

 wave. Judging from the dredge's action, the 

 peat probably occurs in small patches in an 



Fig. 3 - Salt-marsh peat dredged from western end of Georges Bank by the scailoper Ruth Lea. Surface of peat exposed to water (left) shows 

 borings, some occupied by The Rough Piddock, a species of boring clam. Note large twigs in the peat from subsurface layers (right). 



