As of: January 25, 2024, 6:49 a.m
Comments
Press
Split
Drawing of a megalodon with a diver.
© Catmando/Imago
The extinct prehistoric shark has always fascinated researchers.
A study is now surprising with new results.
Did the megalodon look completely different?
The extinct shark Megalodon is often imagined as a beefy, oversized great white shark, with a gaping mouth full of sharp teeth capping a massive body that was 50 feet long from nose to tail.
Now a team of more than two dozen scientists claim that the megalodon was misunderstood and may have been slimmer and longer than previously thought.
Study sparks debate over megalodon's appearance
The new study, published in the journal
Palaeontologia Electronica
, is the latest chapter in an ongoing scientific dispute over what this apex marine predator really looked like and what role it played in the ecosystems of ancient oceans.
Otodus megalodon has been extinct for about 3.6 million years, but many laypeople have an image of this prehistoric super shark in their minds.
Reproductions of its massive jaws form the backdrop for family photos in aquariums across the country.
The megalodon spawned its own Hollywood franchise with the 2018 horror film The Meg.
And dangling above the cafeteria of the National Museum of Natural History is a roughly 2,000-pound, 52-foot-long model.
Read The Washington Post for free for four weeks
Your quality ticket from washingtonpost.com: Get exclusive research and 200+ stories free for four weeks.
The catch is that this is science-based fantasy - and the fundamental question of what the megalodon looked like is a touchy subject among experts.
Actual megalodon appearance disputed
What scientists know for sure is that the megalodon had huge teeth, some as big as an adult human's hand.
They unearthed segments of his fossilized spine.
And recently they analyzed some of its tiny scales.
But its cartilaginous skeleton doesn't fossilize well, so many scientists have drawn on analogies to a living macropredator with similarly shaped teeth: the great white shark.
My news
Speed camera Robin Hood?
“Fleximan” leaves Italy’s authorities perplexed
USA introduces new form of execution - lawyers for the first death row prisoner go to the Supreme Courtread
Health Minister Lauterbach warns: Researchers activate 50,000-year-old “zombie virus” from permafrost harvest
Austria is permanently closing one side of the Brenner motorway bridge - holidaymakers are threatened with permanent traffic jams
“Himalayan geological battlefield”: Tectonic plate beneath Tibet could break in two read
Austria is in debt to a lawyer - who quickly seizes the Chancellery and Schönbrunnlesen Palace
“We're trying to speculate based on the very incomplete evidence,” said Michael Gottfried, a vertebrate paleontologist at Michigan State University who was not involved in the new study.
Several outside experts said the study - which postulates an elongated and slender megalodon that more closely resembles a mako shark than a great white shark - will not settle the matter.
Even if the megalodon is longer than previously thought, it may still have had a robust, massive body, they point out.
But the back and forth shows how fascinated scientists and the public are by this creature.
Parts of a spine discovered in Belgium
Much of what is known about the megalodon's body comes from a collection of 141 pieces of its spine discovered in Belgium in the 1860s.
In the 1990s, Gottfried measured parts of this spine.
In today's great white sharks, there is a mathematical relationship between the width of the vertebrae and the overall length.
When Gottfried applied this ratio to the megalodon's vertebrae, he calculated that the Belgian specimen must have been 30 feet long.
In a previous job at the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland, he constructed a replica megalodon skeleton by enlarging a great white shark and adjusting the proportions.
In 2022, another team of scientists returned to the Belgian specimen to create a 3D model.
They drew analogies to the great white shark, but also considered other modern sharks, and reported that the megalodon specimen was 52 feet long and weighed about 67 tons - a "transoceanic superpredator" that could probably cruise faster than any living shark and its stomach was big enough to swallow an orca.
Megalodon is said to have been slimmer and longer
Other shark experts were not pleased with the results.
In many ways, the new study is a direct response to this: a team of more than two dozen scientists came together to point out errors and provide a counterargument.
Their interpretation of the same specimen suggests that the megalodon was slimmer - and possibly even longer - than previously thought.
"The slender body would suggest that the megalodon was not as powerful a swimmer as the modern great white shark, and this is consistent with the interpretation that the megalodon may have been a slow-swimming shark," said Kenshu Shimada, lead author of the new one Work and professor of paleobiology at DePaul University in Chicago, in an email.
Shimada said the new interpretation supports a recent study by his lab that examined fossil placoid scales, a type of tiny, pointed scales unique to sharks and rays.
This research suggests that the megalodon was "generally a slow cruiser with occasional 'shock swimming' to catch prey," he said.
Researchers express criticism of the latest results
However, both teams criticize each other's studies, a normal - if sometimes uncomfortable - part of scientific progress.
Jack Cooper, a graduate student and shark paleontologist at Swansea University in Wales who led the challenged study, said his team's work was criticized for relying too heavily on the great white shark as an analogue of the megalodon.
However, the new interpretation comes from an analysis that also relies on a comparison with a great white shark.
He also disagreed that a thin spine would necessarily be too narrow to support a bulky animal, pointing out that the extinct shark Cretoxyrhina also had a slender spine but a bulky body shape.
Outside experts said both works still rely on speculation to arrive at their different interpretations.
"At the end of the day, I don't think they get us any closer to understanding what Megalodon really looks like," said Robert Boessenecker, a coastal paleontologist at the nonprofit Charleston Center for Paleontology, who was not involved in the new study.
Dana Ehret, curator of natural history at the New Jersey State Museum, said it's good to see biologists who study the biology of modern sharks joining the discussion about ancient sharks, and to him what's interesting is that both Work suggests that the megalodon was probably longer than scientists once thought.
“Some of the largest sharks today are whale sharks and basking sharks.
They grow to a maximum length of 35 to 40 feet,” Ehret said.
“Imagine a shark 20 feet longer than the largest shark today.
For me this is really unimaginable.”
Famous megapredators
It's not uncommon for paleontologists to argue over the bodies of ancient animals - sometimes with heated debate.
Gottfried recalled how some scientists got into a heated argument about the angle of the femur while assembling a Triceratops specimen.
John Hutchinson, professor of evolutionary biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London, is part of the team that produced the controversial 3D model of the megalodon.
He said the stakes are always high in science, but especially when working on species that fascinate both the public and scientists.
“The more famous an extinct animal is and the rarer it is, the more heated the disagreements can be,” Hutchinson said.
"I know this only too well.
I worked on T. rex.”
Hutchinson said that early in his career they used 2D images of fossilized skeletons and shrunk the skin around them, making them quite thin.
Based on these models, Tyrannosaurus rex was believed to weigh about 11,000 pounds.
Today, however, scientists largely agree, using various methods, that an adult Tyrannosaurus rex would have weighed about 17,000 pounds.
Megalodon research has “changed significantly in the last five to ten years”
The question is important not only because people want to put a face to these giant predators, but also because form can help explain function, which in turn has implications for our understanding of ancient and modern ecosystems.
“This was one of the largest marine carnivores that ever lived, and it was clearly an important part of the marine ecosystem,” said Phillip Sternes, a doctoral student and shark paleontologist at the University of California, Riverside and lead author of the study.
The recent disagreements may provide little clarity about what the megalodon looked like - but scientific competition between research groups has spurred research and taken the field beyond simply describing the discovery of new specimens to research that delves into ancient ecology.
For example, it is estimated that the megalodon became extinct about 3.6 million years ago, perhaps due to competition for prey with the great white shark.
Previous work suggests that after the extinction of the megalodon, the absence of a ferocious marine predator allowed the rise of modern filter-feeding whales.
“In the last five to ten years, megalodon research has really changed a lot - from a kind of stamp collection to an actual paleobiological study with hypotheses,” says Boessenecker.
About the author
Carolyn Johnson
is a science reporter.
She previously covered healthcare and healthcare affordability for consumers.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on January 22, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.