Miocene marine vertebrate trophic ecology reveals megatooth sharks as opportunistic supercarnivores

This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) awarded to Jeremy McCormack (project number 505905610) and the Max Planck Society. Funding to Klervia Jaouen and Benjamin T. Fuller by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (grant agreement number 803676) is acknowledged. Funding to Nicolas Bourgon by the DFG (project number 517968067) is acknowledged. FIERCE is financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG: INST 161/921-1 FUGG, INST 161/923-1 FUGG and INST 161/1073-1 FUGG) , and received financial support from the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation, which is gratefully acknowledged. This is FIERCE contribution No. 199. We thank Julia Melchior, Alex Schmidt, Axel Gerdes and Linda Marko (FIERCE, Goethe University Frankfurt) and Sven Steinbrenner and Manuel Trost (Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) for technical and analytical support. We are grateful to Elmar Unger for providing fossil material from Sigmaringen. We also thank Ursula Gohlich, Geology and Paleontology Department, Natural History Museum Vienna, for granting access to fossil teeth from Passau and the staff of the Fish Collection, I. Zoological Department, Natural History Museum Vienna for providing us with extant elasmobranch teeth. Ingmar Werneburg (Paleontological collection of the University of Tuebingen) is also thanked for the curation of and access to sample material. We thank John R. Nance and Stephen J. Godfrey (Calvert Marine Museum, Solomons, Maryland, USA) and Arnold Suzumoto (Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, USA) for loan and permission for destructive sampling of extant elasmobranch teeth. We thank Henry Gandois for helpful discussions. We thank Tiphaine Chouvelon, Paula Mendez Fernandez, all members of the French National Stranding Network (RNE) and all members of PELAGIS observatory for their continuous effort in collecting data on stranded cetaceans and access to extant cetacean teeth. The RNE and the PELAGIS observatory are funded by the ministry in charge of the environment, the French Office for Biodiversity ("Office Francaise pour la Biodiversite", OFB) , La Rochelle University, the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the "Communaute d'Agglomeration de la Ville de La Rochelle". We are thankful for the constructive feedback given by the anonymous reviewers and the editor Tristan Horner.