[Rockhounds] The City of David and the sharks' teeth mystery

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Scientists have found an unexplained cache of fossilised shark teeth in an
area where there should be none - in a 2900 year old site in the City of
David in Jerusalem. This is at least 80 km from where these fossils would
be expected to be found. There is no conclusive proof of why the cache was
assembled, but it may be that the 80 million-year-old teeth were part of a
collection, dating from just after the death of King Solomon*. The same
team has now unearthed similar unexplained finds in other parts of ancient
Judea.

Presenting the work at the Goldschmidt Conference, lead researcher, Dr.
Thomas Tuetken (University of Mainz, Institute of Geosciences) said:

"These fossils are not in their original setting, so they have been moved.
They were probably valuable to someone; we just don't know why, or why
similar items have been found in more than one place in Israel".
"We had at first assumed that the shark teeth were remains of the food
dumped nearly 3000 years ago, but when we submitted a paper for
publication, one of the reviewers pointed out that the one of the teeth
could only have come from a Late Cretaceous shark that had been extinct for
at least 66 million years. That sent us back to the samples, where
measuring organic matter, elemental composition, and the crystallinity of
the teeth confirmed that indeed all shark teeth were fossils. Their
strontium isotope composition indicates an age of about 80 million years.
This confirmed that all 29 shark teeth found in the City of David were Late
Cretaceous fossils - contemporary with dinosaurs. More than that, they were
not simply weathered out of the bedrock beneath the site, but were probably
transported from afar, possibly from the Negev, at least 80 km away, where
similar fossils are found".

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-07/gc-tco070121.php