Sharks The Animal Answer Guide

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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
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