There is a great fascination with determining the size of the largest sharks, but sometimes it is a complex subject for fossil forms where teeth are often the only thing left.
Now, scientists seem to have finally discovered the actual size of a prehistoric mega shark made famous in Hollywood movies: the megalodon that lived in Earth’s cold waters for 23-3 million years ; that is, from the beginning of the Miocene to the end of the Pliocene, in the middle of the Cenozoic Era (so it did not coexist with the dinosaurs).
Until now, its length had been estimated from the fossils of its teeth. But now, a team from the universities of Swansea and Bristol has combined math with nature to reveal just how big it really was. Their findings appear in the journal Scientific Reports.
Heart attack measures
Experts claimed that the giant shark species would have grown to 18 meters long and weigh about 48 tons , larger than any other shark known to have ever existed and more than twice the size of a great white shark.
With teeth as big as a human hand, it would have had a bite force of more than 10 tons , dwarfing the bite force of a two-ton (and more than 20 feet long) great white shark.
Its tail would not have been left behind: it would measure up to 3.85 meters and its fin would have measured 1.62 meters, the height of a human adult.
The project was overseen by shark expert Catalina Pimiento, from Swansea University, and Professor Mike Benton, a paleontologist from Bristol. Humberto Ferrón from Bristol also collaborated.
“The megalodon is not a direct ancestor of the great white shark, but it is similarly related to other macro-predatory sharks such as the mako shark, the salmon shark, and the porbeagle shark, as well as the great white shark. We collected detailed measurements of all five to make predictions. about the megalodon, “ explains Pimiento. “But we were surprised and relieved to find that, in fact, the young of all these modern predatory sharks start out as small adults and do not change in proportion as they grow.”
Jack Cooper added that: “This means that we could simply take the growth curves of the five modern shapes and project the general shape as they get bigger and bigger, up to a body length of 16 meters.”
The results suggest that the size that a 16-meter-long Otodus megalodon would acquire shows that an adult human could stand on the back of this shark and would be approximately the same height as the dorsal fin.
Reconstruction of the size of the megalodon body parts represents a fundamental step towards a better understanding of the physiology of this giant and the intrinsic factors that may have made it prone to extinction.
Referencia: Jack A. Cooper, Catalina Pimiento, Humberto G. Ferrón, Michael J. Benton. Body dimensions of the extinct giant shark Otodus megalodon: a 2D reconstruction. Scientific Reports, 2020; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-71387-y
