u/NotABoatAccident

Case SA-300 in the Global Shark Attack File, and one of the more unusual entries in it. On the morning of 29 June 1982, Alex Macun, 27, was surfing off a half-moon bay on the Transkei Wild Coast, about 95 km southwest of Port St Johns. He'd just ridden a wave in and was paddling back out when two surfers behind him heard him call out, turned, and saw a large shark on him. People on the rocks watched it happen close to shore. His body was never recovered. The remarkable part is how the species was pinned down. His surfboard washed up with a single large bite out of the right rail, an arc about 43 cm across. Five years later that board was examined by xeroradiography (an x-ray imaging method) to map the tooth impressions left in the foam. Their spacing and shape identified the shark as a white (Carcharodon carcharias), roughly 2.4 m long. That 2.4 m is worth pausing on. About 8 feet, a young white shark, well short of the 4-to-5 m animals people tend to picture in a fatal attack. Eyewitnesses described the shark too, so the ID doesn't hang on the board alone, but the surfboard is the hard physical evidence, and it's a strikingly early use of bite-forensics like this. Documented by Marie Levine of the Shark Research Institute and later published in her peer-reviewed survey of South African white shark attacks (Levine, 1996), where it's case 300: fatal, body not recovered, white shark confirmed by eyewitness account and bite pattern. Full account and sources: https://notaboataccident.com/incident/d9820853-e21f-484c-9c54-f63b2a334ad3