Like all sharks, Carcharocles megalodon, or simply megalodon, had a skeleton made of cartilage, a tissue that is difficult to fossilize; That is why no complete casing has been preserved. But teeth, on the other hand, are a relatively common fossil. It wouldn't be too hard for an amateur paleontologist to find one, and they sell for around two hundred euros on the Internet. They are made of enamel, which is much more durable, and if we add to this that each specimen dropped hundreds of them throughout its life and that these sharks were on Earth for about 17 million years, the mystery is solved. .
Taking advantage of the fact that it is an ancestor of current sharks, in recent years these teeth – and some other fragments – have been used to carry out comparative morphology studies that give us an idea of what their appearance and habits were. We discuss ten curiosities about this beast, the closest thing to a Leviathan that has lurked in the depths.
Pliny the Elder (c. 23-79) already referred to megalodon teeth in his Historia Naturalis. According to Roman mythology, they were petrified human tongues, and in the Middle Ages they were believed to be the vestiges of some biblical dragon and were believed to have healing properties. In pre-Columbian America, for its part, they were used to make spearheads, knives and jewelry.
Because of its similarity to the white shark, 19th-century taxonomists mistakenly assigned it to the lamnid family. Today it is preferred to consider it part of the Otodontidae, which separated from modern sharks one hundred million years ago.
The name was an invention of the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), a famous opponent, by the way, of the evolutionism of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). It comes from the Greek megas, large, and odous, tooth.
The consensus is that the average size of the megalodon was 10.3 meters, although some specimens could reach 17 and even 20 meters. In turn, those that weighed the least 50 tons, and those that weighed the most, 100.
In films like The Meg (2018) they present it as a robust version of the great white shark, but, according to scientists, it could also have been similar to the current basking shark or sand tiger shark.
Distributed in five rows, it had around 276 teeth, each about 18 cm long, and the open jaw could reach two meters from end to end. The bite force, for its part, is estimated at 182,201 newtons for the 20-meter specimens, five times greater than that of Tyrannosaurus rex.
Due to the lesions observed in whale fossils, it is believed that the megalodon broke the rib cage of its prey with the first bite, unlike the white shark, which always starts with the soft parts.
It competed with other great hunters – especially with prehistoric cetaceans, the antecedents of today's sperm whales – but the combination of its size, speed, bite force and hunting strategy make it the main predator of its time and one of the most effective that have existed.
The very wide distribution of the fossils indicates that it lived in both hemispheres. In a similar way to today's large sharks, it could inhabit a wide range of marine ecosystems, although it preferred subtropical and temperate areas.
Its extinction has been related to the closure of the isthmus of Panama (three million years ago), which separated the Pacific and the Atlantic and caused the extinction of most cetaceans – their main food source – and to the glaciations of the Late Pliocene.
