In 1890, fossil hunter Charles H. Sternberg — a little man with a high forehead and kind, close-set eyes — knelt alone atop a chalk outcrop in Western Kansas, and, with his pick and his brush and with the fervor of man who’d been fossil-crazy since he’d arrived in the area from New York State as a boy of just 17, unearthed, vertebrae by vertebrae, the skeleton of a great prehistoric shark.
But it wasn’t just any shark. What the 40-year-old Sternberg uncovered was the King Kong of ancient sharks, Cretoxyrhina mantelli, the “Ginsu shark.”
