Megalodonte was and remains one of the most fascinating animals that have ever lived on Earth, and despite having extinct 4 million years ago continues to hit our imagination. One of the reasons why the biggest shark ever existed has this fame is that it is still relatively mysterious: most of the fossils we found are teethand we still miss a complete specimen.
The few fragments that we have, however, are sufficient to get an idea of the aspect and the life habits of the Megalodonte, and now a team of the Depoul University of Chicago has published on Electronic Palaeontology a study that is the most complete and documented ever produced on this shark – and which forces us to touched all its records upwards.
Update records. The study, conducted by a team of 29 people, obviously starts from the many teeth of Megalodonte that we have found in the last two centuries, but also uses one of the most precious finds relating to this shark: a spine (almost) complete Discovered in Belgium in the nineties. Using these fossils, and combining them with what we know of the other species of shark related to the megalodon, both those still existing (one above all the white shark) and the extinct ones, the team created a complete portrait (as far as possible) of the biggest shark ever.
First of all, increasing the size: the specimen to which the spine belonged was to be 16.4 meters long, but it was still a growing young man; The comparison with a vertebra found in Denmark suggests that these sharks could reach and overcome the 24 meters in length – 4 meters more than we thought.
The mystery of extinction. The megalodon then had explosive growth, concentrated largely in the early years of life: even, At birth the puppies already measured between 3 and 4 meters in length – a record size reached thanks to intrauterine cannibalisma phenomenon for which the growing embryo feeds on other eggs that are not yet Schiusese.
A last important feature that emerged from the study confirms something already suggested in a study published in January of which we talked to you here: unlike the white shark, which is relatively toy and corpulent, Megalodonte had a slender and elongated body – and therefore more efficient from a hydrodynamic point of view.
Therefore, one last mystery remains: why, if the megalodon was bigger and more agile than the white sharks, he got extinct And was it replaced by them?
