Latest Megalodon Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online One of the largest living predatory animals and a magnet for media sensationalism, the great white shark has a misunderstood evolutionary history. Paleontologists have debated that history for the last 150 years, originally classifying the great white as a direct relative of megatooth sharks. A new study from the University of Florida, published in the journal Paleontology, describes and names an ancient intermediate form of the...
A fragment of whale rib found in a North Carolina strip mine is offering scientists a rare glimpse at the interactions between prehistoric sharks and whales some 3- to 4-million years ago during the Pliocene. Three tooth marks on the rib indicate the whale was once severely bitten by a strong-jawed animal. Judging by the 6 centimeter spacing between tooth marks, scientists believe the attacker was a mega toothed shark Carcharocles megalodon, or perhaps another species of large shark which...
Fossilized remains of a giant, prehistoric sperm whale that lived 12 million years ago and had teeth and jaws so large it preyed on whales more than half its size have been discovered in Peru's Pisco basin, scientists reported Wednesday. The Leviathan melvillei, named after "Moby Dick" author Herman Melville, grew up to 60 feet long, and had interlocking, tusk-like teeth 14 inches in length for killing and capturing prey, the scientists said.Although paleontologists have long suspected a...
The six-foot-long babies of the world's biggest shark species, Carcharocles megalodon, frolicked in the warm shallow waters of an ancient shark nursery in what is now Panama, report paleontologists working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the University of Florida."Adult giant sharks, at 60-70 feet in length, faced few predators, but young sharks faced predation from larger sharks," said Catalina Pimiento, visiting scientist at STRI and graduate student at the...
In the famed Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield, Calif., shark teeth as big as a hand and weighing a pound each, intermixed with copious bones from extinct seals and whales, seem to tell of a 15-million-year-old killing ground.Yet, new research by a team of paleontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and the University of Utah paints a less catastrophic picture. Instead of a sudden die-off, the researchers say...
Using sophisticated computer modeling techniques, scientists have determined that the bite force of the great white's extinct relative, the gigantic fossil species Carcharodon megalodon (also known as Big Tooth) is the highest of all time, making it arguably the most formidable carnivore ever to have existed.Shark researchers from the University of New South Wales, Newcastle University, NSW Department of Primary Industries Fisheries (Australia) and University of California (USA) reveal...
