“Baby shark” has taken on a whole new meaning. Newborn megalodon sharks were supersized fish larger than most adult humans, a new study suggests.
An analysis of the growth rates of the ancient ocean predators, which lived between about 23 million and 2.5 million years ago, estimates that the sharks
started life at about 2 meters long, researchers report January 11 in
Historical Biology.
Otodus megalodon is right up there with
Tyrannosaurus rex in the pantheon of
scary extinct predators, but little is actually known about the shark’s biology (
SN: 8/10/18). Its skeleton was made of difficult-to-fossilize cartilage, so what scientists do know mostly comes from fossilized teeth. For example, paleobiologist Kenshu Shimada of DePaul University in Chicago and colleagues previously used megalodon teeth, as well as those of other ancient and modern sharks, to estimate a total adult body length for the fish
of at least 14 meters (
SN: 10/5/20).
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