The identification of shark and ray teeth is often more art than science. Nothing really replaces experience but a catalogue of illustrations would help. It is unlikely that any volume will ever be capable of fully addressing this need. Not only are there dozens of genera and hundreds of species, but the collector is faced with morphological variations which might include:

• Upper and lower teeth are often completely different
• Changes in the tooth shape from front to rear of the mouth (five styles in the Sand Tiger Shark for example)
• Variations caused by the age of the fish (ontogeny) which may cause the presence or absence of lateral cusps, cusplets and serrations.
• Sexual dimorphism
• The possibility that a pathological tooth is being encountered
• Geographically separated populations of a species
• Normal variations of the teeth between otherwise identical individuals
• If dealing with fossil teeth, morphological tooth changes over time.

On top of all the variations, each tooth would need to be illustrated from at least four perspectives: Labial (front), lingual (rear), lateral (side) and basal. Ray teeth require an occlusal (top) view as well.

Skate and ray teeth are even worse than the sharks. The living species have been described, but not their teeth. The paleontological literature is filled with references to Dasyatis sp (stingray) and Raja sp (skate) but these are generic tooth morphology buckets which should not necessarily be confused with either extant genus.

Shark teeth are a splitters dream, on any given trip to the Lee Creek mine, a collector can pick up a tooth which varies in some way from any described species. Find that tooth in a slightly different stratigraphic level in another area and who could prove it's not a new species. By the same token, a lumper could make the same argument because of the potential variability of any given species.

Fortunately, identifying most shark or ray teeth to a family, and usually to a genus, is far less difficult. With a little experience, most teeth found by fossil collectors can be assigned to a genus. It is those unknown teeth that most intrigue the collector, because that is often a characteristic of something new.

Over time, I hope to accumulate and present information which will assist readers in identifying shark and ray teeth beyond the information found in commonly available references (see Reference Material).

Images and illustrations of many shark and ray teeth, mostly from the East Coast of North America, can be seen throughout the website.