You wouldn’t know it to look around now, but Arkansas, at times in the distant past, was teaming with sharks (and other marine fish). Indeed, Arkansas was in part or wholly covered by ocean many times in the past. One such time was 250 million years ago, during the Carboniferous Period. The fossilized Cladodus tooth pictured above belonged to a primitive shark that had sharp teeth with multiple points of varying size that it used to gig fish before gulping them down. The long point at the middle of the tooth is broken off and displaced to the right in this picture.
This particular specimen was found near West Fork, Arkansas. It was collected from the Prairie Grove Member of the Hale Formation, a limey sandstone. However, shark teeth can be found locally, throughout other parts of the state, in marine rock layers spanning hundreds of millions of years.