Jaws

What animal has been around for 400 million years and never sleeps?

When we went to the Science Museum, we stopped in the "Shark Cage". Plenty of interesting stuff there. These fish sculptures are all made out of sand! There was still loose sand all over the floor from the sculpting. The cage is what they lower divers in when they go down to look at sharks. It doesn't look near safe enough to me. Seems like a small shark could swim right in there! Sharks are fascinating. They have lived on this planet for about 400 million years, which means they were here even before dinosaurs! They have five to fifteen rows of teeth, which are not too firmly attached, so they loose teeth easily. When they lose a tooth, another one just spins forward from a row of backup teeth! They can go through 1,000 sets of teeth in a lifetime. They do not have a single bone in their body, their skelton is all made from cartilage. They don't care for their babies; not too surprising! Their bodies are denser than sea water, so if they stop moving, they will sink. Because of this, they can never sleep! No wonder they seem so cranky and snappy! We went to see the movie "Jaws" when it first came out, and it gave me such a headache that I had to take aspirin when we got out of the theater! We should actually be more afraid of bees or wasps. Their stings kill 100 people a year, but only about 6 are killed by sharks. The Book of Jonah 1:17 tells us "The Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights." One of our commentarys says that the fish couldn't have been a whale, because their throat is not big enough. But it could have been a shark, as there are many in the Mediterranian, and their mouths and stomachs are very large. This passage tells us that God prepared this fish just for Jonah; how else could he have breathed in there? So I like to think that this was a fish like no other ever before or since. Some people think this was just a parable or fable, but Jesus actually verifies the truth of it in Matthew 12:40. So the next time you see a shark on T.V., think that it may have been a shark that a man once stayed in for several days and lived to tell the tale!