The Biggest Fish That Ever Existed - Megalodon - Prehistoric Predators - Full Documentary
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Megalodon was Earth’s highest-level apex predator – ever
Tooth analysis shows this prehistoric shark ate anything it wanted – including other predators. Sharks are often described as perfect killing machines. While this sort of negative press certainly doesn’t help conservation efforts today, there is some truth to this lethal impression of these magnificent beasts. And some were far more deadly than others.
In one form or another, sharks have patrolled Earth’s oceans for over 400 million years – since long before even the dinosaurs. The largest predatory shark and biggest fish known to science was megalodon, which ruled the seas until around 3 million years ago.
While its exact size is subject to debate, based on fossil teeth, megalodon may have been 15-18 metres long – three to four times the dimensions of the biggest great white sharks.
These monsters had jaws so wide a human could stand in them. Individual teeth were the size of an adult human hand.
No surprise then that recent research by palaeontologists at Princeton University in the US has shown that megalodon ate whatever it wanted – including other predators. The results of the research, published in Science Advances, indicate this ancient shark was an apex predator with no comparison in all of Earth’s history. “We’re used to thinking of the largest species – blue whales, whale sharks, even elephants and diplodocuses – as filter feeders or herbivores, not predators,” says the paper’s lead author, geoscientist Emma Kast, now based at the University of Cambridge, UK. “But megalodon and the other megatooth sharks were genuinely enormous carnivores that ate other predators, and Meg went extinct only a few million years ago.”
“If Megalodon existed in the modern ocean, it would thoroughly change humans’ interaction with the marine environment,” adds senior author Danny Sigman, professor of geological and geophysical sciences at Princeton.
Kast and Sigman’s team discovered clear evidence that megalodon and its ancestors occupied the highest rung of the prehistoric food chain – called the highest “trophic level”. So high is their trophic signature that the researchers believe megalodon must have eaten other predators and predators-of-predators in a complicated food web. Helping megalodon on its way to the top of the food web is cannibalism. There is evidence of cannibalism in both megatooth sharks and other prehistoric marine predators.
“Ocean food webs do tend to be longer than the grass-deer-wolf food chain of land animals, because you start with such small organisms,” says Kast. “To reach the trophic levels we’re measuring in these megatooth sharks, we don’t just need to add one trophic level – one apex predator on top of the marine food chain. We need to add several onto the top the modern marine food web.”
#history #evolution #dinosaur
Tooth analysis shows this prehistoric shark ate anything it wanted – including other predators. Sharks are often described as perfect killing machines. While this sort of negative press certainly doesn’t help conservation efforts today, there is some truth to this lethal impression of these magnificent beasts. And some were far more deadly than others.
In one form or another, sharks have patrolled Earth’s oceans for over 400 million years – since long before even the dinosaurs. The largest predatory shark and biggest fish known to science was megalodon, which ruled the seas until around 3 million years ago.
While its exact size is subject to debate, based on fossil teeth, megalodon may have been 15-18 metres long – three to four times the dimensions of the biggest great white sharks.
These monsters had jaws so wide a human could stand in them. Individual teeth were the size of an adult human hand.
No surprise then that recent research by palaeontologists at Princeton University in the US has shown that megalodon ate whatever it wanted – including other predators. The results of the research, published in Science Advances, indicate this ancient shark was an apex predator with no comparison in all of Earth’s history. “We’re used to thinking of the largest species – blue whales, whale sharks, even elephants and diplodocuses – as filter feeders or herbivores, not predators,” says the paper’s lead author, geoscientist Emma Kast, now based at the University of Cambridge, UK. “But megalodon and the other megatooth sharks were genuinely enormous carnivores that ate other predators, and Meg went extinct only a few million years ago.”
“If Megalodon existed in the modern ocean, it would thoroughly change humans’ interaction with the marine environment,” adds senior author Danny Sigman, professor of geological and geophysical sciences at Princeton.
Kast and Sigman’s team discovered clear evidence that megalodon and its ancestors occupied the highest rung of the prehistoric food chain – called the highest “trophic level”. So high is their trophic signature that the researchers believe megalodon must have eaten other predators and predators-of-predators in a complicated food web. Helping megalodon on its way to the top of the food web is cannibalism. There is evidence of cannibalism in both megatooth sharks and other prehistoric marine predators.
“Ocean food webs do tend to be longer than the grass-deer-wolf food chain of land animals, because you start with such small organisms,” says Kast. “To reach the trophic levels we’re measuring in these megatooth sharks, we don’t just need to add one trophic level – one apex predator on top of the marine food chain. We need to add several onto the top the modern marine food web.”
#history #evolution #dinosaur