In the age of dinosaurs, before whales, great whites or the bus-sized megalodon, a monstrous shark prowled the waters off what is now northern Australia, among the sea monsters of the Cretaceous period.

Researchers studying huge vertebrae discovered on a beach near the city of Darwin, say the creature is now the earliest known mega-predator of the modern shark lineage, living 15 million years earlier than enormous sharks found before.

And it was huge. The ancestor of today’s six-metre great white shark was thought to be about eight metres long, the authors of a paper published in the journal Communications Biology said.

“Cardabiodontids were ancient, mega-predatory sharks that are very, very common from the later part of the Cretaceous, after 100 million years ago,” said Benjamin Kear,

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