If the megalodon were living in the dark, inky depths, it would have had to become a very different sort of creature—one we might not find nearly as cinematic.
The notion of the megalodon continues to captivate humans. Could this giant, ancient shark still lurk on the ocean floor?.has by all scientific accounts been extinct for more than 3 million years. The ongoing earthly presence of the enormous shark persists in our collective imagination thanks to rumors, legends, and summer B flicks.
Fossil shark teeth got people hooked on the Meg long before paleontology took off in the early 19th century, when scientists started cataloging fossils with gusto. In 1835, Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz described triangular, finely serrated teeth, which had been found worldwide since antiquity, as belonging to a “megatooth” relative of the great white.
The exact combination of factors that pushed the ancient shark into extinction is still murky. We do know that shallower oceanic zones were undergoing dramatic changes around 3.5 million years ago, when the giant disappears from the fossil record. Water was growing cooler, making marine mammals less abundant, and the newly evolved great white may have served as a nimble competitor for resources. But there’s no way to prove definitively what did in the Meg.
If the megalodon were living in the dark, inky depths, though, it would have had to become a very different sort of creature—one we might not find nearly as cinematic. For one thing, Shimada says, its ravenous metabolism would need to fundamentally change. Preliminary geochemical analysis of isotopes in remains, which can help scientists estimate the body temperature of prehistoric organisms, indicates that megalodon was “warm-blooded” in the same sense as the great white.
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