Data from: Decoding the dynamics of dental distributions: insights from shark demography and dispersal

Shark teeth are the most abundant vertebrate fossil, and because tooth
size generally correlates with body size, their accumulations document the
size structure of populations. Understanding how ecological and
environmental processes influence size structure, and how this extends to
influence these dental distributions, may offer a window into the
ecological and environmental dynamics of past and present shark
populations. Here we examine the dental distributions of sand tigers,
including extant Carcharias taurus and extinct Striatolamia macrota, to
reconstruct the size structure for a contemporary locality and four Eocene
localities. We compare empirical distributions against expectations from a
population simulation to gain insight into potential governing ecological
processes. Specifically, we investigate the influence of dispersal
flexibility to and from protected nurseries. We show that changing the
flexibility of initial dispersal of juveniles from the nursery and annual
migration of adults to the nursery explains a large amount of dental
distribution variability. Our framework predicts dispersal strategies of
an extant sand tiger population, and supports nurseries as important
components of sand tiger life history in both extant and Eocene
populations. These results suggest nursery protection may be vital for
shark conservation with increasing anthropogenic impacts and climate
change.