ZME SCIENCE - If Meg 3 ever happens, the filmmakers might need to ditch the oversized great white shark trope. A new study published in Palaeontologia Electronica found that the famous megalodon wasn’t just an outsized version of today’s great white shark. Researchers now say this ancient super-predator was a longer, more streamlined animal built more like a modern lemon shark or even a large whale.
Crunching the Megalodon numbers
The megalodon (formal name Otodus megalodon) roamed Earth’s oceans between 15 and 3.6 million years ago. Though it is known mostly from enormous fossil teeth, one find revealed parts of its skeleton, particularly a fossilized vertebral column, or the “trunk” portion, of O. megalodon measuring about 11 meters (36 feet) in Belgium. The latest study begged the question “so, how big were they actually”?
A team of 28 scientists estimated just how big this vertebral column’s missing sections—namely the head and tail—would have been. Drawing on measurements from 145 modern shark species and 20 extinct species, the researchers concluded that the Belgian megalodon likely measured around 54 feet (16.4 meters) from nose to tail.
“This study provides the most robust analysis yet of megalodon’s body size and shape,” said Phillip Sternes, a shark biologist at the University of California-Riverside (UCR) who also studied at DePaul University, another institution involved in the research. “Rather than resembling an oversized great white shark, it was actually more like an enormous lemon shark, with a more slender, elongated body. That shape makes a lot more sense for moving efficiently through water.”