Megalodon, an ancient shark, had such a huge appetite that it could have swallowed an 8-metre-long whale in just a few bites, according to the first 3D reconstruction of the predator. This new description upgrades its already gigantic size to at least 16 metres long and a weight of 61.5 tonnes.
Previous calculations of megalodon鈥檚 size suggested it was around 14 metres long and weighed 48 tonnes, but at The Royal Veterinary College in the UK was inspired to have a more detailed look at the creature, which died out around 3.5 million years ago.
鈥淚t鈥檚 such a big, poorly understood shark,鈥� says Hutchinson. 鈥淎nd we just made the connection that the kinds of methods I鈥檝e used and developed to study and reconstruct extinct dinosaurs would be really applicable.鈥�
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One challenge was that, unlike dinosaur bones, shark skeletons are made of cartilage and rarely fossilise. Although megalodon teeth are abundant across the globe, their fossilised body parts are limited to a set of 141 vertebrae found in Belgium in the 1860s 鈥� all from the same individual 鈥� and one vertebra uncovered in Denmark in 1983.
Hutchinson and his team scanned the Belgian vertebrae into Hutchinson鈥檚 dinosaur software. To give their virtual animal a head, they scanned a modern great white shark skull and scaled it to fit scans of megalodon teeth they had acquired from other research teams. They then used the way modern sharks鈥� bodies are formed to add soft tissue to their model. To estimate the size of internal organs like the stomach, the team dissected 12 modern great white sharks and compared organ volume to body size.
The resulting 3D image 鈥� while not perfect 鈥� gives a fairly good idea of what megalodon would have looked like, inside and out, says Hutchinson. The beast required 20 times more calories per day than a modern great white shark, he says, and cruised the oceans at 5 kilometres per hour. It would have consumed an 8-metre-long animal such as an orca, which would have co-existed with megalodon, in only five bites, he says.
Such a large, calorie-rich meal, capable of filling its 10,000-litre stomach, would have provided enough nutrients to allow megalodon to go about two months without eating, says Hutchinson. 鈥淚ts huge jaws could do some pretty serious damage and ingest a fair amount of food,鈥� he says.
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