The confirmed fossil record of the blue shark Prionace glauca (Linnaeus, 1758) from the South Eastern Pacific

Abstract

We offer the first formal description of fossil specimens of the blue shark Prionace glauca from Chile. The teeth described in this study were collected from the Mina Fosforita locality and preliminary assigned to the late Miocene.  The confirmation of the presence of the blue shark in the Neogene sediments of Chile is a significant contribution to our global knowledge of the past distribution of chondrichthyans, being the first well-documented record of the species for the southern hemisphere. Our work shows that future studies are still necessary to better understand the evolutionary history of this shark species in the region.