In the early 1990s, five unusually large shark vertebrae were unearthed along the rugged coastline near Darwin, Australia. At the time, they were thought to be the remains of a great white shark, the largest living predatory fish. The bones were placed in a local museum collection and soon forgotten. As it turned out, the fossils were not from a great white at all. Instead, they belonged to a previously unknown species of an extinct giant shark that ruled the oceans millions of years ago.