Huge jaws require huge prey to fill them. “They have a rough exterior that gets smoother at the tooth’s finely serrated edges, and are set in massive jaws that pack an estimated 10,900- to 18,100-kilogram bite force, enough to comfortably snap steel.” © Wikimedia Commons Great whites, by comparison, can generate an estimated maximum bite force of a mere 1,800 kilograms. They have a rough exterior that gets smoother at the tooth’s finely serrated edges, and are set in massive jaws that pack an estimated 10,900- to 18,100-kilogram bite force, enough to comfortably snap steel. Megalodon teeth look like huge, puffed up, blackish triangles with a bulbous root and resemble that of the tip of a fictional dragon’s tongue. In some artists’ impressions, the gigantic fish has taken on the appearance of an oversized great white, with jet plane like pectoral fins, but some palaeontologists believe this to be an incorrect representation, and liken the creature to that of a sand tiger shark. But estimates of the length of its larger cousin, megalodon, range from 12 to 21 metres, with the upper estimate falling just short of the ever-impressive blue whale, at 30 metres. The average great white shark – arguably the apex predator of the modern oceans – can range in length anywhere between four to six metres. We bring you everything we know so far about megalodon: With the discovery of 18-centimetre-long teeth, palaeontologists have managed to brace together a few surprising facts about these amazing extinct sharks.įinding big teeth may seem a foolishly optimistic lead, and many of these findings and predictions are still being debated, but there are a few things that scientists are definitely in agreement on. Checkout Simplemost for additional stories.Ruler of the seas for roughly 25 million years, megalodon is thought to be the largest predator in vertebrate history. This story originally appeared on Simplemost. And don’t go believing it when folks say there might still be one out there - a 65-foot-long shark with a mouth 11 feet tall is hard to miss. Megalodons have been extinct for at least 2 million years. That’s scary, but don’t go canceling your beach vacation yet. The study’s authors theorize that the meg cruised faster than sharks living today, and could “fully consume prey the size of modern apex predators.” Which is to say, these dudes ate whales. A study published in August 2022 used 3-D computer modeling to guess at what the massive shark may have looked like. Scientists have used megalodon teeth to estimate the size and feeding habits of the creature. A tooth so large it could really only belong to the megalodon, a shark-like, long-extinct predator.Īccording to a Facebook post celebrating the find, researchers Katie Kelley and Rebecca Robinson, of the University of Rhode Island, will now work to confirm the tooth’s identification: The team cleaned up the item and found what appears to be a very old, human-hand-sized tooth. The vehicle, dubbed Hercules, was collecting samples for an unrelated study. (Maybe it was looking for a dentist.)Īn unmanned, remote-controlled vehicle snatched the tooth off the ocean floor, 3,089 meters - more than 10,000 feet, under the surface. “This suggests to me that the shark might have been migrating across the ocean when it lost that tooth,” Cooper said. “What’s particularly interesting about this location to me is how remote and way out in the ocean it is, compared to the generally coastal habitats megalodon teeth are found in,” Jack Cooper, a paleobiology researcher at Swansea University, told Newsweek. Previous finds have shown the ancient creatures preferred areas off of the Carolinas and Baja California, for example.īut this mega-chomper showed up in the middle of the Pacific, in an area called the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. What’s especially interesting is that the tooth was found well outside the megalodon’s known habitat. Need some nightmare fuel? Deep sea researchers recently discovered a gigantic megalodon tooth while exploring the ocean floor in the Pacific.
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