Zinc

• Not far away, a pod of small baleen whales headed southward to feed in the nutrient-rich Antarctic waters.
• About 6 million years ago, the seas off Peru were much warmer than today, by at least 4°C.
• Gigantic predators had an even harder time, as they needed much more food each day than smaller creatures.

‘A blood-curdling horror’

• The dolphins belonged to an archaic type named Atocetus, ancestors of the living La Plata dolphins that would later inhabit the same bountiful seas.
• A large living mass was moving in the waters ahead, coming at a fast pace straight toward them.
• It was a menacing thing to detect when nothing at all was visible in the water ahead.
• You might think that we palaeontologists make up scenes like this, but nature is more imaginative than anything our human brains can conjure.
• While it’s true that I choreographed this frightening scene in my head, nature provided the dancers and told us what moves they could perform.

Megalodon: how big was it?

• That is enough strength to crush a pickup truck and have some force still left in the megalodon’s tank.
• She was three times more powerful than Tyrannosaurus rex, the largest land predator of all time.
• Megalodon appeared around 23 million years ago and disappeared around 3.6 million years ago.
• Here at last we have reached the pinnacle of 460 million years of shark evolution, the largest shark ever and Earth’s biggest predator.
• The most commonly asked question about megalodon is: how big was it?
• It must belong to megalodon, as no other shark of this age grows to such large size.

Queen of the Megalodons

• Catalina Pimiento, whom I call Queen of the Megalodons (she approves), is the world’s leading expert on this species.
• And she has made the most detailed study of the factors that drove it to extinction.
• While she intended to work on living sharks, her supervisor suggested she might look at a project on fossil sharks.
• The megalodon was huge, so how did it fill its belly in its endless search for food and energy?

Megalodon: the ultimate predator

• The latter was used as the basis for a complete reconstruction made by the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in 2020.
• The biggest megalodon teeth are fat triangular teeth measuring just over 7 inches long, adorned with sharply serrated biting edges like a jagged steak knife.
• They have been found in every part of the world except Antarctica (where we do have Pliocene fossil deposits with fossil whales but no megalodon teeth).
• Megalodon tooth scars have been found on the tooth of a large extinct sperm whale that lived 5 million years ago.
• The ratio of certain isotopes of zinc in the tooth enameloid of fossil sharks determined whether the shark was a top predator, based on comparing the same zinc ratios in various living sharks.
• Paleontologists have speculated that as megalodon is one of the lamniformes with a lifestyle similar to that of the white shark, an apex predator hunting marine mammals, it also would likely have been warm-blooded.
• Because the large lamnids, like white sharks, makos and thresher sharks, are warm-blooded, they have higher energy requirements than most other sharks.

Why did megaladon go extinct?

• How does such a mighty shark at the apex of the ocean’s food chain go extinct?
• The sudden disappearance of megalodon sometime around 3 million years ago remains one of the great mysteries of shark paleontology.
• At the start of the Pliocene (5.3 million years ago), global temperatures rose to about 2–4°C higher than they are today.
• Either way, we can say with utmost confidence that the last megalodon went extinct sometime between 3.7 and 2.6 million years ago.
• Their ability to endure and feed in near-freezing Antarctic waters might have been a factor in why megalodon went extinct.

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