These teeth overlap in both broad form and edge treatment. Root proportions, jaw position, size, age and locality must carry more weight than silhouette alone.
Minute, simple, backward-curving teeth arranged in hundreds of rows—tiny relative to the shark.
Very small, smooth, curved teeth with variable hooked or conical crowns.
Several cusps
Hooked blade / Several cusps
Smooth edge
Smooth edge
No side cusplets
No side cusplets
Wide / nearly flat root
Wide / nearly flat root
1–6 mm reference range
2–7 mm reference range
Hundreds of rows of tiny teeth; there is no large cutting tooth.
Numerous minute curved teeth vary along the jaw.
Tropical and warm-temperate open oceans and productive coastal aggregations.
Temperate and cool coastal and offshore waters.
Plankton, fish eggs and small schooling organisms filtered from water.
Zooplankton captured by ram filter feeding.
Commonly 8–12 m (26–39 ft); the largest reliably measured animals are longer.
Commonly 6–8 m (20–26 ft); exceptional animals may be larger.
Not meaningful as a feeding metric; this filter feeder does not process prey with a powerful bite.
Not established and not ecologically central to filter feeding.
Sparse because the teeth are minute and fragile.
Small teeth and gill-raker remains occur in Cenozoic deposits.
A tiny isolated tooth is rarely identifiable to whale shark without an associated jaw or exceptional context.
Minute basking-shark teeth are variable and easily confused with other small fossil shark teeth.
Illustrations are original TuffShark diagrams, not photographs taken from either reference.
KEEP COMPARING