Question: you answered my questions very well in the chat but this is a question you didnt answer twll me everything you know about the megaladon shark as i am scared of sharks yet i find if i know more about them then i woont be scared (i know they are extinct)

Laura Soul answered on 13 Mar 2013:

Thanks! Sorry I didn’t have enough time to answer all of your quesitons! Ok, everything I know! This could take a while here goes…

Well megalodon sharks were really really huge (which you already know!) but we’ve never actually found a whole fossil of one, or even very much of it at all. We’ve only ever found teeth and vertebrae, so all the pictures or reconstructions you see are kind of made up. Scientists use information they know about how big other sharks are, and how big their teeth are to figure out how big Megalodon was. When people first found the teeth they thought that they came from dragons!

In the American Museum of Natural History in New York (it’s a really good museum) they have a reconstruction of Megolodon’s jaw, I went there with my friends a few years ago and saw it, I have a cool picture that I took of them pretending to get eaten by it…

It’s closest related species that is alive today (so the species alive today that it is most similar to) is probably the great white shark, so they were very similar to great whites except bigger obviously. One thing that is really cool about them is that they only went extinct 1.5 million years ago. That might seem like a long time but really its very short compared to the whole history of life which started more than 1 billion years ago.

Another cool thing about it, which explains why we have found so many megalodon teeth, is that sharks constantly replace their teeth in rows. Humans only replace their teeth once, baby teeth to adult teeth. Sharks have teeth all over the inside of the front of their mouth, so its like a conveyor belt, the ones at the front fall off and a new row moves around in to place. This would have happened in a Megalodon shark for the whole of its life so you can imagine that means a lot of its teeth would have fallen out for us to find later.

All sharks, including Megalodon, are mostly made of cartilage, this is what your ears are made of. We have lots of hard bones, but Megalodon had lots of soft cartilage and this is why we can only find teeth and backbones from them because the soft cartilage would have decomposed very quickly and not been preserved as a fossil for us to find.

Their teeth are found all over the planet so it seems like they probably swam all over the place. Palaeontologists have found fossil whale bones that have been bitten by Megalodon, so we know that it ate whales. It probably ate seals as well.

The important thing is though, that it is definitely extinct, and so nothing to be scared of! If you don’t go in the sea in places where there are sharks then the sharks that are alive today are nothing to be scared of either! I actually went scuba diving last summer with sharks, most of them are pretty harmless.