The gigantic extinct shark species that are known as the Megalodon has captured the interest of scientists and the general public, even inspire the Blockbuster film 2018 MEG. The species lived about 3.6 million years ago and no complete skeleton has been found yet. So there has been a lot of discussion among paleobiologists about the size, body shape and swimming speed of megalodon, alongside other characteristics.
Although some researchers have compared megalodon with a gigantic version of the stocky big white shark, others believe that the species had a slimmer body shape. A new article published in the magazine Palaeontologia Electronics strengthens the last point of view and also draws conclusions about the body mass of the megalodon, swimming speed (based on hydrodynamic principles) and growth patterns.
As mentioned earlier, the largest shark that lives today, which reaches up to 20 meters long, the whale shark, is a Sedatate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, sharks of that scale, however, probably include the fast -moving predator Megalodon (formally Otodus Megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we are not entirely sure how big megalodons were and can only draw conclusions based on some of their living family members.
Thanks to research published in 2023 on his fossilized teeth, we are now pretty sure that Megalodon shared something else with these family members: it was not completely cold -blooded and kept his body temperature above that of the surrounding ocean. Most sharks, like most fish, are Ectotherm, which means that their body temperatures match those of the surrounding water. But a handful of species, part of a group called mackerel sharks, are Endotherm: they have a specialized pattern of blood circulation that helps to maintain part of the heat that produces their muscles. This enables them to keep some body parts at a higher temperature than their environment.
A special importance for this newest paper is a study from 2022 by Jack Cooper of Swansea University in the UK and its co-authors. In 2020, the team reconstructed a 2D model of the Megalodon, with the dimensions based on comparable existing shark species. The researchers succeeded in 2022 with a reconstructed 3D model and extrapoled the dimensions of a megalodon monster (a spine) in Belgium. Cooper concluded that a megalodon would have been a stocky, powerful shark – which would be about 52 feet (16 meters) with a body mass of 67.86 tons – to perform high -speed eruptions to attack prey, just like the significantly smaller large white shark.
