Sharks The Animal Answer Guide

Sharks in Stories, Media, and Literature 209

Movies. Hollywood and its foreign wannabes know sharks sell and
consequently churn out big and especially low-budget shark attack movies.
These films are often as not set in undersea labs or at spring-break or other
vacation beach locations, involving ginormous psychomutant / genetically
modified sharks, scantily clad coeds, and marine biologists (some female
and also scantily clad) as both villains (mad scientist types) and heroes. Jaws

A White Shark’s lower-jaw tooth

found at the Cahokia archeological

dig near St. Louis, Missouri, dat-

ing back perhaps 1 , 000 years. The

hole drilled in the tooth suggests it

had been strung on a necklace or

attached to a wooden handle as a

weapon or tool. Given the tooth’s

size— 2 cm ( 0. 8 in) wide and almost

3 cm ( 1. 2 in) tall—it probably came

from a fairly large animal. Photo © Ken

Farnsworth, curated at the Gilcrease Museum;

photo provided courtesy of Laura Kosuch, used

with permission of copyright holder

In many cultures, it is believed that

one can attain the strength, courage,

or other desirable characteristics of

an animal by carrying or using an

object directly tied to it, like wearing

a shark tooth necklace. Considering

this, we guess that Great White ale

makes sense. More puzzling is the

Dogfish Head variety of beers. Photo

by Gene Helfman