The megalodon went extinct 3.6 million years ago and is thought to be the largest shark that ever swam the Earth — until now. (Story first aired on All Things Considered on January 23m 2023.)
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The megalodon went extinct 3.6 million years ago. It’s thought to be the largest shark that ever swam the Earth, but there is a debate over what it looked like. A research team now suggests megalodon may have been slimmer than scientists assumed. Science reporter Ari Daniel has more.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Phillip Sternes grew up outside of Chicago – not a drop of saltwater in sight. But he remembers he was 5 or 6 when he first encountered megalodon in the movie “Jaws.”
PHILLIP STERNES: I watched it over and over on a videotape countless times. There’s actually a scene where Chief Brody’s flipping through the book, and then he sees a picture of the megalodon.
DANIEL: It was only a matter of time before Sternes became a shark researcher himself. He’s currently a grad student at UC Riverside. A while back, he learned that what megalodon looked like was an unresolved question based on incomplete fossil evidence – tons of teeth, a smattering of scales and vertebrae and nothing more.
STERNES: You literally will pick every single detail you can out from that limited fossil evidence to try to figure out, what the heck did the shark look like?
DANIEL: For years, researchers assumed that megalodon was just a bigger version of the modern-day great white shark.
STERNES: You know, the large, serrated, triangular teeth, a top-level macro predatory shark, top of its food chain.
DANIEL: Back in the ’90s, Sternes says there was this research team that calculated the relationship between the largest vertebra of a great white shark and its total length.
STERNES: Basically, if you found a great white shark, its vertebra, and you could plug it into that equation, and you can predict the length of the shark just from the vertebra. So…
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