Megalodonte is one of the most famous animals ever, one of the few prehistoric beasts capable of rivaling with dinosaurs in terms of fame. Yet, despite being also one of the most studied, until today we have lacked a very important detail on the biggest shark ever: what exactly ate.
In fact, we were convinced that his favorite prey, almost exclusive, were whales, but a new study published on Earth and Planetary Science Letters denies this idea, explaining that The megalodon was actually much less splashy.
The teeth and the diet. We have been knowing for some time that megalodon was an exceptional predator, potentially capable of breaking up prey up to 10 meters long. This fact had led the paleontologists to hypothesize that it had specialized in large prey, and that it would ignore too small. That’s why the most widespread interpretation on his diet was that he went to hunt mainly of whales.
The Goethe University team in Frankfurt, however, tried to analyze the megalodonte diet Using its teethand more precisely two zinc isotopes found in the teeth and bones of many animals, including humans. THE Two isotopes are zinc-64, lighter, and zinc-66heavier. Well, the animals that are at the lowest levels of the trophic network (the prey, in practice) accumulate more zinc-64 and less zinc-66. With each “passage” upwards, zinc-66 is less and less present, and in the apical predators it is almost absent.
If you move, I eat it. Studying the relative quantity of the two zinc isotopes accumulated in the teeth of megalodon has therefore allowed the team to establish what kind of prey to eat: if it feeds exclusively with very large animals such as whales, its teeth should contain less zinc-66 than what it would be found if instead had fed on fish of all kinds.
And the results of the analyzes say this: some of the designed teeth contained quite zinc-66 to suggest that the megalodonte eaten anything in front of himwhale or not, and did not focus only on the largest prey. The team also found interesting regional differences: for example, the megalodons of Passau, Germany, ate many more prey small than those found elsewhere.
