The bad news is that the megalodon shark was bigger, faster and fiercer than we had thought. In fact, it was 52 feet long, weighed 70 tons, swam faster than a great white, and could devour a 26-foot orca in just five bites. The good news is that the megalodon became extinct about 3.6 million years ago.
Paleontologists and marine scientists have long tried to judge the real size of a megalodon. They had to make their estimates based on megalodon teeth discovered in the 1860s. Shark skeletons are largely cartilage, so they don’t result in many fossils.
But now a team under John Hutchinson at The Royal Veterinary College in the UK has used high-tech 3-D modeling to define the megalodon’s size, shape, speed and appetite more accurately. They just published their results in the journal Science Advances.
It turns out that everyone had underestimated the megalodon’s dimensions by about 20 percent. According to the 3-D modeling, the ancient shark weighed as much at 10 elephants and was as long as a school bus. And it was a strong swimmer.
“It would be a superpredator just dominating its ecosystem,” Hutchinson said. “There is nothing really matching it.” It also was transoceanic, able to travel great distances at a cruising speed of 3 mph. Its jaws could open 6 feet wide.
The megalodon dominated the Pliocene Period, from 5.4 to 2.4 million years ago. The earth was warmer then than it is today (the ice age came later), and the animals included cows, antelopes, horses, rhinos, dogs, cats and even weasels. Read more:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm9424
