The prehistoric megalodon is known as one of the most fearsome creatures the world has ever known, a horrifyingly giant shark immortalized in the monster movie The Meg.
However, after reanalyzing the fossil evidence, scientists yesterday said they now think the shark was significantly thinner than previously thought.
While the 2018 B-movie starring Jason Statham depicted a megalodon preying on modern-day humans, the shark actually went extinct about 3.6 million years ago.
Photo: Hugo SALAIS / Metazoa Studio / AFP
Previous research has suggested it could have been up to 20m long, but size estimates have varied widely because they were based on the only remaining fossils of the shark, which are teeth and vertebrae.
Moreover, scientists had assumed that the megalodon had a similar stocky body shape to its modern descendant, the great white shark.
However, a better model may be the thinner mako shark, an international team of researchers behind a study in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica said.
“Our team re-examined the fossil record, and discovered the megalodon was more slender” than had been thought, University of California, Riverside biologist Phillip Sternes said in a statement.
However, in bad news for Statham in the next Meg movie, the shark might have been even longer than previously believed.
“It still would have been a formidable predator at the top of the ancient marine food chain, but it would have behaved differently based on this new understanding of its body,” Sternes said.
In better news for the hapless human victims in a possible future Meg movie, the megalodon “may not have been a powerful swimmer” compared with the great white shark, said study coauthor Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago.
It might also have had to hunt less due to a longer digestive canal. This could also affect the mystery of the megalodon’s extinction. It was previously theorized that the shark died off because there was less prey around.
However, its updated body image could point toward a different culprit.
“I believe there were a combination of factors that led to the extinction, but one of them may have been the emergence of the great white shark, which was possibly more agile, making it an even better predator than the megalodon,” Sternes said.
Shimada said that knowing the Otodus megalodon’s true shape would require finding a more complete skeleton.
“The fact that we still don’t know exactly how O. megalodon looked keeps our imagination going,” he added.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS