Extinct shark named after LSU museum official as she retires

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A Louisiana State University museum official has received a unique retirement gift — researchers in Alabama and South Carolina named a prehistoric shark species after her. For 26 years, Suyin Ting has been collections manager for vertebrate paleontology at the LSU Museum of Natural Science. A news release from LSU says her new namesake is Carcharhinus tingae. Its fossilized teeth are in the museum’s collection. David Cicimurri of the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, and Jun Ebersole of the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama, realized they were from a previously unrecognized species. They named it after Ting, who retired Thursday. Their paper was published this week.