The Earth sank twice, flooding the Eastern Amazon: Team finds shark tooth in northwest Amazon basin

A tiny shark tooth, part of a mantis shrimp and other microscopic marine organisms reveal that as the Andes rose, the Eastern Amazon sank twice, each time for less than a million years. Water from the Caribbean flooded the region from Venezuela to northwestern Brazil. These new findings by Smithsonian scientists and colleagues, published this week in Science Advances, fuel an ongoing controversy regarding the geologic history of the region.