SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE - In the more than 400 million years that sharks have been swimming through Earth’s seas, none has been larger than Otodus megalodon. The great megatoothed shark reached more than 50 feet in length and prowled oceans the world over between 2.6 million and 23 million years ago. Despite the shark’s success and its fame as a massive apex predator worthy of multiple B-movies, paleontologists are still investigating what the giant shark actually looked like. And a new proposal suggests that O. megalodon was more slender than previously thought.
The latest study, (including scientists from the University of California, Riverside) published Sunday in Palaeontologia Electronica, draws from a portion of an O. megalodon backbone to suggest that the shark had a proportionally longer body than that of the modern great white shark. But some outside experts are doubtful about the new restoration.