Granularity of elevation in GMTED2010 data / understanding shapefiles

Following on from Records of shapefile do not contain every field, where @scruss provided some very helpful Python code.

I seem to have a fundamental inability to understand a shapefile (reader object).

Each Pyshp shape consists of a record plus a geometry (bounding box).

However, each record also has “north, south, west, east” items, which have a granularity of one degree.

And the min/max/mean elevations never change over that one degree. Every record in that one degree seems ot have the same elevation values, although each has a different bbox.

I need more detail, and had hoped/expected that those elevations would reflect the bbox.

Am I out of luck? I want to extract the highest elevation for each 0.01 degree square.

The field names are

: 
['ID', 
 'SOURCE_ORG', 
 'SOURCE', 
 'EL_SURFACE', 
 'NORTH', 
 'SOUTH', 

 'WEST', 
 'EAST', 
 'X_SRCE_RES', 
 'Y_SRCE_RES', 
 'HORZ_UNIT', 
 'COORD_SYS', 
 'HORZ_DATUM', 
 'VERT_DATUM', 
 'VERT_UNIT', 
 'MIN_ELEV', 

 'MAX_ELEV', 
 'MEAN_ELEV', 
 'SDEV_ELEV', 
 'PROD_DATE']

and here are the first two records, followed by their bboxes.

: 
[268, 
 'Univ of Bristol', 
 'Ant Radar and Laser Alt DEM', 

 'Reflective', 
 -55,    <===== these four don't change for many records, but the booxes do
 -90, 
 -180, 
 180, 
 1000.0, 
 1000.0, 
 'Meter', 
 'Polar Sterographic', 
 'WGS 84', 

 'WGS 84', 
 'Meter', 
 -82,     <=== these are the elvations
 4211,    <=== which remain constant for the 1 dgeree square
 2152.694, 
 1127.631, 
 '31Aug2011']


: 

[269,     <=== a new record number
 'Univ of Bristol', 
 'Ant Radar and Laser Alt DEM', 
 'Reflective', 
 -55,     <=== stil the same 1 degree square
 -90, 
 -180, 
 180, 
 1000.0, 
 1000.0, 

 'Meter', 
 'Polar Sterographic', 
 'WGS 84', 
 'WGS 84', 
 'Meter', 
 -82,    <=== still the same elevation data
 4211, 
 2152.694, 
 1127.631, 
 '31Aug2011']

and the two bboxes :

[-103.71666666971798, -72.74206576893341, -103.58333333639, -72.71706576893436]

[-126.75833333546299, -73.17539910224943, -126.64166666880098, -73.14206576891738]

Here is the code that produces the above data

            data = shapefile.Reader(arguments.data_path + '\\' + fileName)

            # get field names, skipping deleted flag

            field_names = []
            for f in data.fields[1:]:
                field_names.append((f[0]))

            shapeRecords = data.iterShapeRecords()

            for shape in shapeRecords:
                geometry = shape.shape
                record = shape.record