Megalodon - The Apex Predator of the Prehistoric Oceans

sharks the most dangerous and feared predators in the ocean but even the great white pales in comparison to the biggest shark but ever lived Megalodon literally translated it means big tooth a prehistoric shark with three metre jaws lined with deadly rows of serrated teeth Megalodon used these jaws to inflict massive damage on even the biggest whales in the ocean its teeth was huge six to maybe seven inches long wickedly serrated on either side like steak knives and shaped like a big broad triangle now two million years after the last Megalodon mysteriously disappeared from the fossil record scientists are investigating the true shape size and behavior of one of the most fearsome predators in history [Music] see water covers almost a 70% of the Earth's surface this is where life on our planet first began and some of these early underwater creatures were big predatory fish giant squid stingrays toothed whales and other dangerous predators have long roamed the sea and 300 million years before t-rex took its first bite an apex predator was scouring the watery depths the shark paleontologists have found remarkable fossil evidence of these predators going back more than 400 million years the biology of these sharks has remained remarkably stable for all this time if you looked at a shark from say 350 million years ago you'd have no trouble identifying that as a shark I mean they have some differences with what we think of it's sort of the conventional look of sharks today but you would you would not be confused you would know right away that you were looking at a shark although many of these prehistoric sharks are now extinct the great white shark which still roams the sea today has survived more than ten million years it has become the ultimate ocean predator but the great white paled in comparison to another giant shark that ruled the seven seas dominating every other predator in the ocean Megalodon literally translated it means big to Megalodon was a giant fossil shark lived from maybe 25 million years ago up till about 2 million years ago the largest oceanic predatory shark that we are aware of in the fossil record fantastic huge enormous predator that the likes of which the oceans hadn't seen before since it was one of the biggest predators of all time you've got these massive razor blades sharp teeth attached to an animal the size of a Greyhound bus I mean this was the ultimate predator Netta has an apex predator made such a huge mark on the planet only to leave so little trace of itself behind it's like the ultimate detective story we truly don't know exactly what the Megalodon look like we can only assume how it looked and how it killed in order to solve this mystery scientists need fossil evidence but in the case of Megalodon there are no skeletons left to study this presents a major challenge to researchers all creatures in the sea or on land begin to decompose and fall apart the moment they die for those with skeletons within a short period of time all that is left are the bones but when it comes to Megalodon as a the shark's skeleton is constructed almost entirely of cartilage consequently there are very few fossilized remains left to show scientists the size and shape of this gigantic fish cartilage pliable and light it's the balsa wood of the body but exposed to salt water sand and especially bacteria Megalodon skeleton has little staying power the cartilage is this brownish yellow material that's the flexible component of the cartilaginous skeleton you can actually see the little tiny prisms which add structural support and rigidity to the otherwise flexible cartilage and that's what gives the skeleton its strength however because these individual little prisms of cartilage are held together with organic fibers after the shark dies those organic fibers can then decompose within weeks shark cartilage breaks apart and disappears the teeth protected by an enamel coating a one of only two parts of the skeleton to survive these massive teeth are extremely long scientists are using them as the building blocks to reverse-engineer the giant shark the only other known fossil remains are a few small pieces of backbone the Calvert Cliffs along the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland are a well known site for uncovering fossils of prehistoric sharks dr. Stephen Godfrey has been digging for fossils here for more than ten years in that time he has not found a single Megalodon tooth along with dr. Breton Kent Godfrey scours the area searching for fossil twos oh there's a shark tooth little one yep oh there's some bone right here this for about a twelve or fourteen foot long shark the roots missing it's just a crown you gotta see this after a few minutes of searching the face of the cliff dr. Godfrey spies something about a meter up the wall this has never happened to me before Wow it's not really big but it's a Meagan it's in really nice condition and it's just sitting there this is so sweet you can see the serrations on it its pristine I mean check that out oh absolutely perfect oh that is gorgeous incredibly on the 1-day cameras are there to record their fossil hunt Godfrey extracts a rare 10 to 12 million year old Megalodon shark tooth from the clay Laden cliff nice upper lateral any better than that that's beautiful a gorgeous wonder that's very nice what are the interesting things about this tooth if you notice the tip there's a compression fracture on it compression fractures when the tooth bites down vertically and strikes something hard like bone and actually instead of producing a flake off of the side it actually crushes the tip to powder and compression fractures themselves are very common on megladon heating compression fractures and other violent accidents from biting down on their prey have resulted in a unique biological adaptation by sharks over the last 400 million years constant and lifelong tooth replacement over a 25 year life span a shark will shed approximately 20,000 teeth other predators such as crocodiles also replace teeth but to produce so many in a lifetime is a characteristic unique to the shark the shark's mouth and gums contain an endless conveyor belt of replacement teeth just below and above the gum line waiting to flip forward and take their place in the front row of teeth these Megalodon teeth can unlock a tremendous amount of information about this creature once you find a big tooth the rest is gravy with the found teeth piling up in museum collections around the world interest in Megalodon intensified over the last few centuries in 1909 ichthyology sand paleontologists in New York at the American Museum of Natural History labored with great effort to build what they thought was the ultimate Megalodon jaw the finished jaw caused a sensation showing a gaping 3 meter high collection of nasty sharp edged teeth but they'd made some crucial errors in their reconstruction that paleontologists continue to correct and refine even today zoologist and shark collector dr. Gordon Hubble has been studying shark teeth and jaws for four decades back in early 1900s when they reconstructed that Megalodon jaw besides having problem with keeping the teeth in the jaw they didn't know the dental formula that no didn't know the dental arrangement of Megalodon so the teeth were just put in kind of half in constructing the display the scientists appeared to have chosen the largest teeth available from fossil deposits around the world and the dimensions reflected that the jaw was enormous the 1909 effort eventually raised questions with the teeth going front-to-back all be that large and then they were the sheer number of teeth in the jaw it seemed excessive this version of Megalodon had more teeth than the modern great white these doubts fueled an even larger debate is the modern great white shark the best comparison model for the size and shape of Megalodon how closely related are these creatures from the deep lion Johnson has been studying the living great white shark up close and personal in the waters of the coast of South Africa I think when the guys discovered these huge fossilized teeth they wanted to find something in today's world that possibly was similar and the only real shark that springs to mind is a great white shark and so this is why you always get this constant comparison between the great white and the Megalodon well as the white shark just a little version of what the Megalodon was back in prehistoric times the massive predatory great white holds a mythical place in the minds of fishermen sailors and other sea lovers the maximum size that a great white gets is probably among shark biologist most debated question that has always talked about speak to any fisherman and he says my boat's 20 foot long and it was to four that way two foot that way must be 25 26 foot and that's probably not the case in truth the largest modern great white sharks are believed to be about 6 meters long with a maximum weight around 1,800 kilograms Megalodon is commonly thought to reach between 15 to 17 meters with an almost unimaginable weight of 45,000 kilograms I think that comparison is pretty good between the great whites and the Megalodon but you also must remember the only information we have about Americas from his teeth I think the main similarity between the teeth of the Meg and the teeth of the great white other than that big size is probably the serrations they're triangular serrations and what that shows me dealing is that both sharks rather than swallowing their prey whole was taking chunks out of very big prey possibly as big as himself in 1988 scientist Gorton Hubble received a call from a fellow fossil collector about a remarkable find at a phosphate mine in Florida Larry Martin had uncovered a set of 95 teeth from one Megalodon shark this matched set became the holy grail of Megalodon research they unlocked part of the mystery surrounding this astounding creature this is the most complete set of associated Megalodon teeth it has ever been found the reason why this is significant is that once we can arrange these teeth we can figure out if the animal is truly related to the white shark lion or if it's related to some other species of sharks 80 years after the first jaw was constructed Hubble's teeth may hold the key to understanding the true shape and size of the greatest predator the sea has ever known [Music] megalodon a ferocious predator that roamed the seas for 20 million years and all that's left is the teeth and a few scattered vertebrae in 1988 gordon Hubble helped to identify the most complete set of Megalodon teeth but how did these teeth fit together inside the shark's jaw Hubble was stumped they'd led to about 10 years of frustration because we we didn't know at the time for sure what the dental formula on the magnet on the shark was and so every time a scientist came to visit us or just anybody that wanted to look at these teeth we had them place these teeth now they thought they would go on the mouth the third tooth is a prominent feature in the modern great white shark's jaw line and that's what really bothered us it wasn't until we realized that the Megalodon is an entirely different line of evolution and does not have that third upper tooth that small tooth that slants in and indeed has a third upper tooth that's about the same size as the first two teeth then we figured it out and everything fell into place there are 24 teeth in the upper jaw the lower jaw has a total of 22 teeth behind the 46 teeth in the front row approximately 200 more teeth lie in rows waiting to flip forward to the front and take their place on the predatory battlefield other scientists and museums were now interested in taking that knowledge and putting together a realistic Megalodon jaw recreation fossil collector John Bobby ours has amassed a huge collection of Megalodon teeth with the help of museum curator Brad Archer he undertook the task of building an accurate recreation of the Megalodon jaw no one had done a project before at least not in the scale that we wanted buddy ours and Archer worked diligently to figure out the shape and placement of the upper and lower teeth using models and pictures of great white jaws and earlier Megalodon reconstructions right off the bat we figured oh damn these teeth are gonna fit because they're way too big and there's no room in the jaw unless the shark only had four teeth in a row you know that's not correct first the teeth are sanded smooth next a hole is drilled in the base of the tooth and the metal rod is inserted the rod is then attached to the jaw mold but they still needed help placing the teeth in the jaw the men turned to Gordon Hubble and his knowledge have associated Megalodon tooth sets to see if he could help organize the teeth and we looked at all the teeth that he had and we put them together into a set as closely as we could in September of 1994 the jaws were finally completed the men loaded the jaws onto a flatbed truck and drove them to the Museum at Arizona State the results were astounding while not quite as large as the jaws built in New York in 1909 it's clear an animal would have to be of massive proportions to carry a set of Jaws this size well this jar is approximately seven and a half feet tall and it's about eight and a half feet wide if I remember right and that's about 254 teeth all real teeth once scientists had an idea about the size and scale of the teeth and jaws they could start to figure out what the body was like the Calvert marine museum skeleton paints a vivid portrait of the infrastructure needed to support the massive jaws but the next step was to create a lifelike representation of this beast what would a creature of this size looked like swimming towards you in the ocean dr. Michael Gottfried who had worked on the Calvert skeleton now felt confident he could speculate on what this beast might have looked like from the outside collaborating with artist and animal modeler Jim Mille and make model was born I mean basically this kind of thing is it's a marriage of science and our taking scientific information and converting it into a sculpture a 15-meter life-size replica of Megalodon now hangs in the San Diego Natural History Museum so after all the research working with models working with drawings working with the actual specimens that we do have here's the end result what we think is the most accurate and the most biologically plausible reconstruction of Megalodon that's on exhibit anywhere from the first mech tooth found by early humans scientists now have a stunning picture of this massive creature hundreds of teeth capable of inflicting terrible damage on its prey a jaw or three meters wide and 2 meters high a body at least 15 meters long Megalodon was enormous and doing kind of an estimate of the size of this fossil giant that it would probably be about a ton of foot so in the neighborhood of about 50 tons plus truly enormous animal the question now was not so much what did the shark and its jaws look like but how did they work scientists sometimes look to the biting and killing behavior of the more than great white shark to try and understand how Megalodon behave both sharks are thought to use the same thrusting sawing motion to rip gaping holes in their prey during an attack an expedition with ryan johnson into the shark-filled waters off Massell Bay South Africa provides a rare glimpse of this behavior fresh fish liver axes good shark bait it's not long before the first strike she may hold it he's gonna start doing his hitch change there he goes shake shake just a little one see when you grasp it he said of biting but then once you really got a hold of it he started shaking his head back and forth never really what makes a white shark unique is that not only does it bite and try to grasp the stuff and swallow it it starts the duration its head back and forth you're trying to remove pieces of them of the meat of the prey then feeding that observation from the deck of the boat is not good enough for Johnson to get a complete understanding of how the great white swims you need to get in the water with the shark new audio techniques provide real-time commentary on what Johnson is seeing one of the great what power for swimming is coming from a snail so what engines this is these two muscle bands two written muscle bands that go from his body right down to his tails and they just worked like two big pesto's getting forth back and forth and this makes it one of the most efficient swimmers and predators in the ocean we did some experiments and he years ago in which we calculated the speed of breaching great whites see how fast out coming out of the water and these things were hitting up to 19 20 miles an hour Megalodon would probably have needed the same speed and power 12 million years ago the smaller more agile Sita Thea whale similar to the modern-day minke whale would have been a fairly common prey item for Megalodon still they were a tough test the megalodons hunting ability although this whale was only one-fifth the length of the adult Megalodon it still weighed a massive nine thousand kilograms using its powerful tail muscles the 15 metre carnivore rockets towards the surface the whale may not have a higher top speed than the Megalodon but it was more agile with its awesome power and speed the Megalodon had the ability to leap above the surface of the water with a nine thousand kilogram whale and still in its jaws in a matter of moments dinner was served with one quick kill Megalodon had proved that it had the strength and agility to rule the oceans of the world megladon ruled the oceans for almost 20 million years but even top predators have to keep their lineage going from generation to generation most scientists agree that like the great white the prehistoric Megalodon gave birth to live young [Music] the megladon probably gave birth to only one pup at a time when you consider that a neonate a pop would have been anywhere from perhaps seven to ten feet long that's already a very large shark and those baby sharks were hungry I can see no reason why they wouldn't have been born ready to attack larger prey items a herd of docile Duggan's or sea cows as they're sometimes called might be just the ticket for an apex predators first meal one of the other kinds of marine mammals that were pray for Megalodon worthy sea counts they were dugongs not manatees manatees are a more recent evolutionary arrival so dugongs have tails very much like dolphins unlike the manatees which have the more rounded beaver like end of tail the matured Agong was about three and a half meters long compared to the baby sharks three meter body based solely on size comparison the baby shark would seem to be at a disadvantage but size is only one part of the equation they are relatively slow sluggish animals this is a section of sea cow rib very heavy and dense and you'll notice that there's this bite mark running across the rib made by the tooth of a very large shark the hungry baby Shaun rushes forward one small juvenile de Gong is slow to react and the shark is on it a lifetime of hunting has begun scientists are also keenly interested in just how long was the lifetime of these giant sharks in the fossil preparation laboratory at the Florida Museum of Natural History dr. Bruce McFadden and his students are doing cutting-edge research into the lifespan and eating habits of prehistoric sharks scientists study growth rings within the relatively few vertebrae of Megalodon that are known to exist this is one way to discover more about these magnificent beasts and their daily life we count them just the way somebody would count tree rings the lower portion of a shark's vertebra is known as a centrum in Megalodon centra are extremely rare scientists are looking at the few samples they have to see what else they can learn about this prehistoric beast most of these samples that we have indicate that Megalodon live somewhere between 25 and 40 years it probably could have lived longer because it didn't have any predators estimates of how much the Megalodon needed to eat ranged from 600 to 1200 kilos of food a day this high-energy animal must have been consuming a wide range of fish and marine mammals to sustain its life we don't know exactly what foods they were feeding on no matter what they were eating one thing is clear these massive sharks spent the bulk of their lifetime in another ending search for food and 15 million years ago Mya seen EPOC oceans were filled with a variety of marine life from which the Megalodon could choose a meal whales dolphins Dagon's huge sea turtles and hosts of fish filled the coastal sea waters around the world the Megalodon was probably eating them all the most common group of whales during the Maya scene was the set of fear these small whales ranged from 3 to 6 meters and were found in warmer coastal waters all around the world a whale that fed on plankton crustaceans and tiny fish these ocean mammals were quick and agile despite their hefty 9 to 18,000 kilogram size like the de Gong these gentle creatures were likely easy targets for the hungry Megalodon but dr. Steven Godfrey has one piece of whale backbone that may demonstrate Megalodon was not always successful in its hunt for prey unfortunately the surface of the bone is worn and the secret to what happened to the whale is hidden from sight inside the vertebra off the table now do you want the entire thing scan or just through pathology the modern cat scan can help Godfrey uses today's technology to look back some 12 million years it reveals the severity of the ancient whales injury a compression fracture runs the length of this vertebra dr. Godfrey theorizes what might have happened when the small whale was attacked by the massive Megalodon I believe that this whale was hit by the giant Megalodon and that intense impact caused the vertebra to experience this intolerable strain that popped the bottom of the verba off pushed it forward and the healing that went on here in this verba is evidence that in spite of the intensity of the impact it it survived it is the story of one megalodons missed prey opportunity and one whales fight to get away perhaps this time when the prowling Megalodon looked up at the surface of the water there was a pod of three whales swimming by full-grown adults closer to 6 metres and weighing in at 18,000 kilograms the Megalodon positions itself under the whales for an ambush the small whale wavers and the giant shark cannot adjust its trajectory the megalodons massive jaws missed their target and his head smashes into the whale's back the cat scan proves this time the whale escaped the whale was lucky in most cases it was easy prey for Megalodon but 20 million years ago there was another marine mammal that could match megalodons aggression this is a skull of an ancient whale called a squad aunt and these animals could echolocate and they were probably taught predators for their time spalled on would have been a pretty formidable opponents followed on didn't get as big as Megalodon but they got pretty good size 2530 feet I think would be a pretty good estimate for a reasonable size squalid on squad Adam is a top predator like today's transient Lucas we want to interpret any behavior in extinct animal we have to look at modern animals in the case of these squalid aunts we would probably look at the modern killer whale whales have been known to attack sharks it's not simply a one-way street or sharks attack whale squalid on at a maximum length of nine meters would not have taken on a 15 meter megladon by itself but they would fight if the Megalodon spotted a squatted on it wouldn't have hesitated to attack scientists believe these marine mammals may have travelled in pots swallowed on being a big toothed whale would have been a highly intelligent animal Megalodon not so much higher reasoning powers and sharks not as nearly as well-developed as you as what we find in marine mammals even an enormous animal like Megalodon is going to feel this punch in the gills this time it's outnumbered the first scholar Don may not survive for long but the Megalodon has sustained a few battle scars of its own not all attacks were successful like all predators only a certain percentage of their attacks actually result in killing a prey that they then consume but prey species other than squalor Don's and Doug ons may have provided richer pickings there were also large whales swimming in the coastal waters of the Pliocene epoch really large whales and when Megalodon wanted a three-course dinner it may have gone after a beast even bigger than itself the modern blue whale is a magnificent animal rarely photographed and usually seen only by accident this massive marine mammal is a startling reminder of the awesome majesty of some of the Seas most elusive creatures 5 million years ago the whales Megalodon encountered may have been almost as impressive here I'm just thinking about what modern things like fin whales and blue whales look like it would have been a coastal animal would have been a migratory animal it probably was gray with a lighter shade below we usually estimate the weights of living baleen whales at about a ton of foot so you have an animal 75 to 80 feet long it'd be about 75 to 80 tons so you've got at least five species there you know those actually look like our pedasi team the weird kind of suit there's dr. Lawrence Barnes and his colleagues have uncovered hundreds of whale bones in the last few decades one intriguing discovery was a large whale found near Santa Barbara with a sharp-toothed tip stuck in its jawbone here was a creature that was possibly three to nine meters longer than Megalodon a whale that would have outweighed the shark by 22,000 kilograms but the reward for killing a larger whale would have been a much bigger food source for the Megalodon a whale of this size is packed with layers of tough stringy blubber Megalodon would need all of the size volume and deadly serrations along its teeth to take down the animal the key this time is bite force how much jaw power did Megalodon actually have at the University of New South Wales in Australia dr. Stephen row is using high-tech computer sleuthing to try and understand the cranial mechanics of bite force found in modern and prehistoric animals bite force is the amount of pressure applied when the jaws of an animal bite down on its prey what's generating the bite force here are the actual drawer closing muscles what we're looking at the is a simple lever system so we apply force on one end of the lever and we get a reaction force on the other end of the believer Rose process for understanding bite force in sharks starts with the gruesome task of cat scanning a shark head at a local hospital I then build a a surface model and from that I can then create a solid three-dimensional engineering model or finite element model from this engineering model Rho has figured out the potential maximum bite force of the modern great white shark in a case of a really big white pointer we're predicting a bite force around about four thousand pounds these largest of white pointers are really pushing the envelope as far as living animals are concerned with the bite force per inch data from the great white Roe extrapolates what he believes to be a fairly accurate understanding of the bite force of the Megalodon shark toward the upper end of estimates of body mass for Megalodon we're gaining by force estimates of about 40,000 pounds which is just humongous we're 40 thousand pounds of bite force you know bite through a truck if you had the teeth and truss to stand up to this must have been an absolutely terrifying object to anyone of course living large baleen whales get very very anxious when they see or hear orcas or killer whales but the sight of one of these guys coming coming out the must have been just absolutely horrific the baleen whale didn't have much time to be anxious once the attack had begun it would appear that Megalodon typically took out a large whales by swimming up behind them biting their tail flippers off basically just disabling the whales propulsion system all together this is certain death for the whale as he bleeds out through a gaping hole in his artery but with no hands to hold down his enormous prey how did the Megalodon keep the sixty eight thousand kilogram whale from swimming off after one bite to the belly or throat at Wright State University in Ohio by paleontologist Chuck's Ian paleo has constructed an experiment that demonstrates the deadly potential at the Megalodon to attack a giant prey item a high density gel mold will simulate whale flesh the centerpiece of the demonstration is a set of mechanical Megalodon jaws that he believes simulates the unique jaw motion of the shark's mouth these jars are really interesting because in addition to being able to lift up and down they also are highly mobile in a forward direction just like modern laminates and Megalodon would have been also the metal jewels are firmly attached to the table and instead of having the jaw attack the mold the bite is replicated by having the mold rolled into place inside the mouth the shark uses its lower teeth to initiate the attack and hold its prey in place we can see the lower teeth anchored into the flesh a good three inches it's already starting to tear the flesh this is holding down the flesh and now the top is going to make its bite the upper jaw bites down on the prey with its powerful serrated teeth at that point Megalodon would thrust back and forth until a bite was made the bottom jaw continues to anchor into the gel flesh while the unique upper jaw with its ability to move somewhat independently from the rest of the skull and takes bite after bite pulling flesh into its mouth as it continues to feed okay well we've created heard massive wounds to our prey item we can see that the teeth have made huge couch marks have split off nearly half of the flesh now if this was the actual shark this piece of flesh would extend out in both directions probably three or four feet because of the size of the jaws and you would have probably nearly 40 teeth sinking into the flesh the mechanical jaws leave no doubt about the powerful combination of bite force and cutting power that Megalodon used on prey like the Santa Barbara Whale within minutes the whale is nothing but a tasty caucus voting south along the California coast for one more day Megalodon has found a meal a very big meal but unfortunately for Megalodon during the Pliocene epoch ocean temperatures started to cool the numbers of whale species were also diminishing megalodons reign as the all-time apex predator of the sea had been hearing it megladon disappeared from the fossil record during the Pleistocene epoch around 1.8 million years ago scientists are unsure why this efficient hunting machines time at the top of the predator list came to a close extinction is always something that fascinates people we want to know not only how things live we want to know why they died why they're no longer around why they're no longer with us the assumption there though is always that extinction is somehow the fault of the animal or the species that goes extinct that's because it was poorly adapted a negative thing that's not necessarily always the case clearly species want to perpetuate their existence paleontologists are unsure what finally killed off the shark could another apex predator like the killer whale have wiped out the Megalodon another intriguing possibility is changes in climate 6 to 1.8 million years ago just as Megalodon teeth disappeared from the fossil record scientists have noticed a cooling in the ocean temperatures this may have adversely affected a shark accustomed to swimming in warmer waters [Music] paleontologists also know that as the myosin epoch progressed the population of smaller whales was replaced by larger whales these whales may have favored colder climates to the north it might very well be that as wells became migratory and spent the summer time in northern latitudes that in fact the the Sharks just worked didn't have access to the big whales by the middle of the Pliocene without year-round access to larger prey Megalodon may have been feeling acute hunger pangs with a loss of a large portion of the whales perhaps three-quarters of all the whale species at the time who ended up losing a major food source for Megalodon the giant shark would have become increasingly desperate for food cannibalism was always a possibility with Megalodon but could have increased as other sources of food thinned smaller Megalodon teeth have been found in deposits alongside other marine mammals that were prey items for the shark there is speculation that these juvenile megalodons may have been at risk from bigger hungrier Meigs the closing of the land bridge in South America may have also affected the worldwide migratory patterns of some marine animals the disappearance of the Central American Seaway and its replacement by land bridge and the effect upon marine organisms has been debated among scientists we look at things like even the modern sperm whales the same species exist in both Atlantic and Pacific and the question is are they going around the southern continents or are they just very slow to evolve it is unclear if the closing of the Isthmus of Panama that connects North and South America could have affected Megalodon scientists continue to search for clues about Megalodon and its demise by studying the great white shark the starters the modern great white is equipped with a remarkable internal heating system known as giganto Fermi which is an excellent survival tool most fish are cold blooded and the great white is and it's warm-blooded it elevates its body temperature up above the ambient water temperature which for a long time was a characteristic solely assigned to mammals and they do that with a special system of blood vessels that actually warms the blood that supplies critical parts of the shark's sensory biology so the eyes the nose particularly paleontologists have not yet figured out if Megalodon possessed this extraordinary biological capability if they did not as temperatures cooled it's possible the great white was in a better position to withstand the dip in the ocean temperatures more importantly scientists believe having more variety in its diet probably helped the great white shark while Megalodon was primarily preying on larger marine mammals the great white was able to eat smaller prey items and fish they need less biomass to keep going they're probably not as much pressure if you will as there is on an apex predator the size of Megalodon which would mean to need a tremendous amount of biomass to maintain as its existence in essence unlike the great white megladon may well have eaten its way out of existence the great white was clearly a more adaptable animal and as a result it flourishes and oceans around the world to this day but the question of whether these two magnificent sharks were related continues to interest scientists paleontologist Chuck's Ian paleo and other experts insist there was little direct relationship between Megalodon and the great white according to sam padilla advanced computer technology underscores the differences between the two animals i think one of the things i like to see cleared up is they to allow Megalodon to be called you know Karkare Cleese Megalodon change the name separated out from the great white and let's get on with business at this point the great white tooth and the Megalodon tooth do have some markings in common both a triangular and serrated but the great white tooth and its prehistoric ancestor have little or no scar at the base whereas the Megalodon clearly has a prominent Chevron shaped scar and blowing up the great white tooth to the same height of a Megalodon tooth reveals that even at the same length the great white fossil tooth is noticeably thinner and more grassle than the Megalodon tooth well let me let me do the converse here let me show you a very small Megalodon about approximately the same size as this great white and you can see that small sizes the Megalodon doesn't look the same again the serration densities are different this tooth is distinct from this great white no matter how big you make it the team compared the dentition of the modern great white the extinct mako and make little and what we found consistently was weather would not we looked at the root the blade or the entire tooth was that the extinct mako and great white always clustered together for every tooth position while Megalodon always clustered away Megalodon their great white are not directly related Megalodon is not the extinct great white and all scientific evidence points to this what does it looking all the way back to the first jaw recreation in 1909 there are scientists who still insist the great white shark is more directly related to the Megalodon The Smoking Gun rare fossilized Megalodon vertebra backbone anatomy suggests that Megalodon and great whites are quite closely related to one another these researchers are turning to work being done on the centra of Megalodon vertebrae to support this theory I think because the vertebral centra haven't been as thoroughly studied they provide some very important clues and I think they they ought to be studied very carefully but Megalodon centra are not common worldwide for the 16 or 17 million years that it lived we probably have on the order of a dozen to two dozen vertebral centra of Megalodon preserved it'll be some time before scientists can collect more comprehensive data in this area perhaps the information locked inside the vertebral centra can finally answer the question of whether or not negligence legacy lives on in the great white shark one point everyone agrees on is that there is much more to learn about the physical makeup and behavior of Megalodon and one thing is certain the unique combination of physical size tooth shape jaw strength and appetite created an animal unique in the 400 million year history of sharks big tooth is still the all-time king at the sea

sharks the most dangerous and feared predators in the ocean but even the great white pales in comparison to the biggest shark but ever lived Megalodon literally translated it means big tooth a prehistoric shark with three metre jaws lined with deadly rows of serrated teeth Megalodon used these jaws to inflict massive damage on even the biggest whales in the ocean its teeth was huge six to maybe seven inches long wickedly serrated on either side like steak knives and shaped like a big broad triangle now two million years after the last Megalodon mysteriously disappeared from the fossil record scientists are investigating the true shape size and behavior of one of the most fearsome predators in history [Music] see water covers almost a 70% of the Earth&#39;s surface this is where life on our planet first began and some of these early underwater creatures were big predatory fish giant squid stingrays toothed whales and other dangerous predators have long roamed the sea and 300 million years before t-rex took its first bite an apex predator was scouring the watery depths the shark paleontologists have found remarkable fossil evidence of these predators going back more than 400 million years the biology of these sharks has remained remarkably stable for all this time if you looked at a shark from say 350 million years ago you&#39;d have no trouble identifying that as a shark I mean they have some differences with what we think of it&#39;s sort of the conventional look of sharks today but you would you would not be confused you would know right away that you were looking at a shark although many of these prehistoric sharks are now extinct the great white shark which still roams the sea today has survived more than ten million years it has become the ultimate ocean predator but the great white paled in comparison to another giant shark that ruled the seven seas dominating every other predator in the ocean Megalodon literally translated it means big to Megalodon was a giant fossil shark lived from maybe 25 million years ago up till about 2 million years ago the largest oceanic predatory shark that we are aware of in the fossil record fantastic huge enormous predator that the likes of which the oceans hadn&#39;t seen before since it was one of the biggest predators of all time you&#39;ve got these massive razor blades sharp teeth attached to an animal the size of a Greyhound bus I mean this was the ultimate predator Netta has an apex predator made such a huge mark on the planet only to leave so little trace of itself behind it&#39;s like the ultimate detective story we truly don&#39;t know exactly what the Megalodon look like we can only assume how it looked and how it killed in order to solve this mystery scientists need fossil evidence but in the case of Megalodon there are no skeletons left to study this presents a major challenge to researchers all creatures in the sea or on land begin to decompose and fall apart the moment they die for those with skeletons within a short period of time all that is left are the bones but when it comes to Megalodon as a the shark&#39;s skeleton is constructed almost entirely of cartilage consequently there are very few fossilized remains left to show scientists the size and shape of this gigantic fish cartilage pliable and light it&#39;s the balsa wood of the body but exposed to salt water sand and especially bacteria Megalodon skeleton has little staying power the cartilage is this brownish yellow material that&#39;s the flexible component of the cartilaginous skeleton you can actually see the little tiny prisms which add structural support and rigidity to the otherwise flexible cartilage and that&#39;s what gives the skeleton its strength however because these individual little prisms of cartilage are held together with organic fibers after the shark dies those organic fibers can then decompose within weeks shark cartilage breaks apart and disappears the teeth protected by an enamel coating a one of only two parts of the skeleton to survive these massive teeth are extremely long scientists are using them as the building blocks to reverse-engineer the giant shark the only other known fossil remains are a few small pieces of backbone the Calvert Cliffs along the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland are a well known site for uncovering fossils of prehistoric sharks dr. Stephen Godfrey has been digging for fossils here for more than ten years in that time he has not found a single Megalodon tooth along with dr. Breton Kent Godfrey scours the area searching for fossil twos oh there&#39;s a shark tooth little one yep oh there&#39;s some bone right here this for about a twelve or fourteen foot long shark the roots missing it&#39;s just a crown you gotta see this after a few minutes of searching the face of the cliff dr. Godfrey spies something about a meter up the wall this has never happened to me before Wow it&#39;s not really big but it&#39;s a Meagan it&#39;s in really nice condition and it&#39;s just sitting there this is so sweet you can see the serrations on it its pristine I mean check that out oh absolutely perfect oh that is gorgeous incredibly on the 1-day cameras are there to record their fossil hunt Godfrey extracts a rare 10 to 12 million year old Megalodon shark tooth from the clay Laden cliff nice upper lateral any better than that that&#39;s beautiful a gorgeous wonder that&#39;s very nice what are the interesting things about this tooth if you notice the tip there&#39;s a compression fracture on it compression fractures when the tooth bites down vertically and strikes something hard like bone and actually instead of producing a flake off of the side it actually crushes the tip to powder and compression fractures themselves are very common on megladon heating compression fractures and other violent accidents from biting down on their prey have resulted in a unique biological adaptation by sharks over the last 400 million years constant and lifelong tooth replacement over a 25 year life span a shark will shed approximately 20,000 teeth other predators such as crocodiles also replace teeth but to produce so many in a lifetime is a characteristic unique to the shark the shark&#39;s mouth and gums contain an endless conveyor belt of replacement teeth just below and above the gum line waiting to flip forward and take their place in the front row of teeth these Megalodon teeth can unlock a tremendous amount of information about this creature once you find a big tooth the rest is gravy with the found teeth piling up in museum collections around the world interest in Megalodon intensified over the last few centuries in 1909 ichthyology sand paleontologists in New York at the American Museum of Natural History labored with great effort to build what they thought was the ultimate Megalodon jaw the finished jaw caused a sensation showing a gaping 3 meter high collection of nasty sharp edged teeth but they&#39;d made some crucial errors in their reconstruction that paleontologists continue to correct and refine even today zoologist and shark collector dr. Gordon Hubble has been studying shark teeth and jaws for four decades back in early 1900s when they reconstructed that Megalodon jaw besides having problem with keeping the teeth in the jaw they didn&#39;t know the dental formula that no didn&#39;t know the dental arrangement of Megalodon so the teeth were just put in kind of half in constructing the display the scientists appeared to have chosen the largest teeth available from fossil deposits around the world and the dimensions reflected that the jaw was enormous the 1909 effort eventually raised questions with the teeth going front-to-back all be that large and then they were the sheer number of teeth in the jaw it seemed excessive this version of Megalodon had more teeth than the modern great white these doubts fueled an even larger debate is the modern great white shark the best comparison model for the size and shape of Megalodon how closely related are these creatures from the deep lion Johnson has been studying the living great white shark up close and personal in the waters of the coast of South Africa I think when the guys discovered these huge fossilized teeth they wanted to find something in today&#39;s world that possibly was similar and the only real shark that springs to mind is a great white shark and so this is why you always get this constant comparison between the great white and the Megalodon well as the white shark just a little version of what the Megalodon was back in prehistoric times the massive predatory great white holds a mythical place in the minds of fishermen sailors and other sea lovers the maximum size that a great white gets is probably among shark biologist most debated question that has always talked about speak to any fisherman and he says my boat&#39;s 20 foot long and it was to four that way two foot that way must be 25 26 foot and that&#39;s probably not the case in truth the largest modern great white sharks are believed to be about 6 meters long with a maximum weight around 1,800 kilograms Megalodon is commonly thought to reach between 15 to 17 meters with an almost unimaginable weight of 45,000 kilograms I think that comparison is pretty good between the great whites and the Megalodon but you also must remember the only information we have about Americas from his teeth I think the main similarity between the teeth of the Meg and the teeth of the great white other than that big size is probably the serrations they&#39;re triangular serrations and what that shows me dealing is that both sharks rather than swallowing their prey whole was taking chunks out of very big prey possibly as big as himself in 1988 scientist Gorton Hubble received a call from a fellow fossil collector about a remarkable find at a phosphate mine in Florida Larry Martin had uncovered a set of 95 teeth from one Megalodon shark this matched set became the holy grail of Megalodon research they unlocked part of the mystery surrounding this astounding creature this is the most complete set of associated Megalodon teeth it has ever been found the reason why this is significant is that once we can arrange these teeth we can figure out if the animal is truly related to the white shark lion or if it&#39;s related to some other species of sharks 80 years after the first jaw was constructed Hubble&#39;s teeth may hold the key to understanding the true shape and size of the greatest predator the sea has ever known [Music] megalodon a ferocious predator that roamed the seas for 20 million years and all that&#39;s left is the teeth and a few scattered vertebrae in 1988 gordon Hubble helped to identify the most complete set of Megalodon teeth but how did these teeth fit together inside the shark&#39;s jaw Hubble was stumped they&#39;d led to about 10 years of frustration because we we didn&#39;t know at the time for sure what the dental formula on the magnet on the shark was and so every time a scientist came to visit us or just anybody that wanted to look at these teeth we had them place these teeth now they thought they would go on the mouth the third tooth is a prominent feature in the modern great white shark&#39;s jaw line and that&#39;s what really bothered us it wasn&#39;t until we realized that the Megalodon is an entirely different line of evolution and does not have that third upper tooth that small tooth that slants in and indeed has a third upper tooth that&#39;s about the same size as the first two teeth then we figured it out and everything fell into place there are 24 teeth in the upper jaw the lower jaw has a total of 22 teeth behind the 46 teeth in the front row approximately 200 more teeth lie in rows waiting to flip forward to the front and take their place on the predatory battlefield other scientists and museums were now interested in taking that knowledge and putting together a realistic Megalodon jaw recreation fossil collector John Bobby ours has amassed a huge collection of Megalodon teeth with the help of museum curator Brad Archer he undertook the task of building an accurate recreation of the Megalodon jaw no one had done a project before at least not in the scale that we wanted buddy ours and Archer worked diligently to figure out the shape and placement of the upper and lower teeth using models and pictures of great white jaws and earlier Megalodon reconstructions right off the bat we figured oh damn these teeth are gonna fit because they&#39;re way too big and there&#39;s no room in the jaw unless the shark only had four teeth in a row you know that&#39;s not correct first the teeth are sanded smooth next a hole is drilled in the base of the tooth and the metal rod is inserted the rod is then attached to the jaw mold but they still needed help placing the teeth in the jaw the men turned to Gordon Hubble and his knowledge have associated Megalodon tooth sets to see if he could help organize the teeth and we looked at all the teeth that he had and we put them together into a set as closely as we could in September of 1994 the jaws were finally completed the men loaded the jaws onto a flatbed truck and drove them to the Museum at Arizona State the results were astounding while not quite as large as the jaws built in New York in 1909 it&#39;s clear an animal would have to be of massive proportions to carry a set of Jaws this size well this jar is approximately seven and a half feet tall and it&#39;s about eight and a half feet wide if I remember right and that&#39;s about 254 teeth all real teeth once scientists had an idea about the size and scale of the teeth and jaws they could start to figure out what the body was like the Calvert marine museum skeleton paints a vivid portrait of the infrastructure needed to support the massive jaws but the next step was to create a lifelike representation of this beast what would a creature of this size looked like swimming towards you in the ocean dr. Michael Gottfried who had worked on the Calvert skeleton now felt confident he could speculate on what this beast might have looked like from the outside collaborating with artist and animal modeler Jim Mille and make model was born I mean basically this kind of thing is it&#39;s a marriage of science and our taking scientific information and converting it into a sculpture a 15-meter life-size replica of Megalodon now hangs in the San Diego Natural History Museum so after all the research working with models working with drawings working with the actual specimens that we do have here&#39;s the end result what we think is the most accurate and the most biologically plausible reconstruction of Megalodon that&#39;s on exhibit anywhere from the first mech tooth found by early humans scientists now have a stunning picture of this massive creature hundreds of teeth capable of inflicting terrible damage on its prey a jaw or three meters wide and 2 meters high a body at least 15 meters long Megalodon was enormous and doing kind of an estimate of the size of this fossil giant that it would probably be about a ton of foot so in the neighborhood of about 50 tons plus truly enormous animal the question now was not so much what did the shark and its jaws look like but how did they work scientists sometimes look to the biting and killing behavior of the more than great white shark to try and understand how Megalodon behave both sharks are thought to use the same thrusting sawing motion to rip gaping holes in their prey during an attack an expedition with ryan johnson into the shark-filled waters off Massell Bay South Africa provides a rare glimpse of this behavior fresh fish liver axes good shark bait it&#39;s not long before the first strike she may hold it he&#39;s gonna start doing his hitch change there he goes shake shake just a little one see when you grasp it he said of biting but then once you really got a hold of it he started shaking his head back and forth never really what makes a white shark unique is that not only does it bite and try to grasp the stuff and swallow it it starts the duration its head back and forth you&#39;re trying to remove pieces of them of the meat of the prey then feeding that observation from the deck of the boat is not good enough for Johnson to get a complete understanding of how the great white swims you need to get in the water with the shark new audio techniques provide real-time commentary on what Johnson is seeing one of the great what power for swimming is coming from a snail so what engines this is these two muscle bands two written muscle bands that go from his body right down to his tails and they just worked like two big pesto&#39;s getting forth back and forth and this makes it one of the most efficient swimmers and predators in the ocean we did some experiments and he years ago in which we calculated the speed of breaching great whites see how fast out coming out of the water and these things were hitting up to 19 20 miles an hour Megalodon would probably have needed the same speed and power 12 million years ago the smaller more agile Sita Thea whale similar to the modern-day minke whale would have been a fairly common prey item for Megalodon still they were a tough test the megalodons hunting ability although this whale was only one-fifth the length of the adult Megalodon it still weighed a massive nine thousand kilograms using its powerful tail muscles the 15 metre carnivore rockets towards the surface the whale may not have a higher top speed than the Megalodon but it was more agile with its awesome power and speed the Megalodon had the ability to leap above the surface of the water with a nine thousand kilogram whale and still in its jaws in a matter of moments dinner was served with one quick kill Megalodon had proved that it had the strength and agility to rule the oceans of the world megladon ruled the oceans for almost 20 million years but even top predators have to keep their lineage going from generation to generation most scientists agree that like the great white the prehistoric Megalodon gave birth to live young [Music] the megladon probably gave birth to only one pup at a time when you consider that a neonate a pop would have been anywhere from perhaps seven to ten feet long that&#39;s already a very large shark and those baby sharks were hungry I can see no reason why they wouldn&#39;t have been born ready to attack larger prey items a herd of docile Duggan&#39;s or sea cows as they&#39;re sometimes called might be just the ticket for an apex predators first meal one of the other kinds of marine mammals that were pray for Megalodon worthy sea counts they were dugongs not manatees manatees are a more recent evolutionary arrival so dugongs have tails very much like dolphins unlike the manatees which have the more rounded beaver like end of tail the matured Agong was about three and a half meters long compared to the baby sharks three meter body based solely on size comparison the baby shark would seem to be at a disadvantage but size is only one part of the equation they are relatively slow sluggish animals this is a section of sea cow rib very heavy and dense and you&#39;ll notice that there&#39;s this bite mark running across the rib made by the tooth of a very large shark the hungry baby Shaun rushes forward one small juvenile de Gong is slow to react and the shark is on it a lifetime of hunting has begun scientists are also keenly interested in just how long was the lifetime of these giant sharks in the fossil preparation laboratory at the Florida Museum of Natural History dr. Bruce McFadden and his students are doing cutting-edge research into the lifespan and eating habits of prehistoric sharks scientists study growth rings within the relatively few vertebrae of Megalodon that are known to exist this is one way to discover more about these magnificent beasts and their daily life we count them just the way somebody would count tree rings the lower portion of a shark&#39;s vertebra is known as a centrum in Megalodon centra are extremely rare scientists are looking at the few samples they have to see what else they can learn about this prehistoric beast most of these samples that we have indicate that Megalodon live somewhere between 25 and 40 years it probably could have lived longer because it didn&#39;t have any predators estimates of how much the Megalodon needed to eat ranged from 600 to 1200 kilos of food a day this high-energy animal must have been consuming a wide range of fish and marine mammals to sustain its life we don&#39;t know exactly what foods they were feeding on no matter what they were eating one thing is clear these massive sharks spent the bulk of their lifetime in another ending search for food and 15 million years ago Mya seen EPOC oceans were filled with a variety of marine life from which the Megalodon could choose a meal whales dolphins Dagon&#39;s huge sea turtles and hosts of fish filled the coastal sea waters around the world the Megalodon was probably eating them all the most common group of whales during the Maya scene was the set of fear these small whales ranged from 3 to 6 meters and were found in warmer coastal waters all around the world a whale that fed on plankton crustaceans and tiny fish these ocean mammals were quick and agile despite their hefty 9 to 18,000 kilogram size like the de Gong these gentle creatures were likely easy targets for the hungry Megalodon but dr. Steven Godfrey has one piece of whale backbone that may demonstrate Megalodon was not always successful in its hunt for prey unfortunately the surface of the bone is worn and the secret to what happened to the whale is hidden from sight inside the vertebra off the table now do you want the entire thing scan or just through pathology the modern cat scan can help Godfrey uses today&#39;s technology to look back some 12 million years it reveals the severity of the ancient whales injury a compression fracture runs the length of this vertebra dr. Godfrey theorizes what might have happened when the small whale was attacked by the massive Megalodon I believe that this whale was hit by the giant Megalodon and that intense impact caused the vertebra to experience this intolerable strain that popped the bottom of the verba off pushed it forward and the healing that went on here in this verba is evidence that in spite of the intensity of the impact it it survived it is the story of one megalodons missed prey opportunity and one whales fight to get away perhaps this time when the prowling Megalodon looked up at the surface of the water there was a pod of three whales swimming by full-grown adults closer to 6 metres and weighing in at 18,000 kilograms the Megalodon positions itself under the whales for an ambush the small whale wavers and the giant shark cannot adjust its trajectory the megalodons massive jaws missed their target and his head smashes into the whale&#39;s back the cat scan proves this time the whale escaped the whale was lucky in most cases it was easy prey for Megalodon but 20 million years ago there was another marine mammal that could match megalodons aggression this is a skull of an ancient whale called a squad aunt and these animals could echolocate and they were probably taught predators for their time spalled on would have been a pretty formidable opponents followed on didn&#39;t get as big as Megalodon but they got pretty good size 2530 feet I think would be a pretty good estimate for a reasonable size squalid on squad Adam is a top predator like today&#39;s transient Lucas we want to interpret any behavior in extinct animal we have to look at modern animals in the case of these squalid aunts we would probably look at the modern killer whale whales have been known to attack sharks it&#39;s not simply a one-way street or sharks attack whale squalid on at a maximum length of nine meters would not have taken on a 15 meter megladon by itself but they would fight if the Megalodon spotted a squatted on it wouldn&#39;t have hesitated to attack scientists believe these marine mammals may have travelled in pots swallowed on being a big toothed whale would have been a highly intelligent animal Megalodon not so much higher reasoning powers and sharks not as nearly as well-developed as you as what we find in marine mammals even an enormous animal like Megalodon is going to feel this punch in the gills this time it&#39;s outnumbered the first scholar Don may not survive for long but the Megalodon has sustained a few battle scars of its own not all attacks were successful like all predators only a certain percentage of their attacks actually result in killing a prey that they then consume but prey species other than squalor Don&#39;s and Doug ons may have provided richer pickings there were also large whales swimming in the coastal waters of the Pliocene epoch really large whales and when Megalodon wanted a three-course dinner it may have gone after a beast even bigger than itself the modern blue whale is a magnificent animal rarely photographed and usually seen only by accident this massive marine mammal is a startling reminder of the awesome majesty of some of the Seas most elusive creatures 5 million years ago the whales Megalodon encountered may have been almost as impressive here I&#39;m just thinking about what modern things like fin whales and blue whales look like it would have been a coastal animal would have been a migratory animal it probably was gray with a lighter shade below we usually estimate the weights of living baleen whales at about a ton of foot so you have an animal 75 to 80 feet long it&#39;d be about 75 to 80 tons so you&#39;ve got at least five species there you know those actually look like our pedasi team the weird kind of suit there&#39;s dr. Lawrence Barnes and his colleagues have uncovered hundreds of whale bones in the last few decades one intriguing discovery was a large whale found near Santa Barbara with a sharp-toothed tip stuck in its jawbone here was a creature that was possibly three to nine meters longer than Megalodon a whale that would have outweighed the shark by 22,000 kilograms but the reward for killing a larger whale would have been a much bigger food source for the Megalodon a whale of this size is packed with layers of tough stringy blubber Megalodon would need all of the size volume and deadly serrations along its teeth to take down the animal the key this time is bite force how much jaw power did Megalodon actually have at the University of New South Wales in Australia dr. Stephen row is using high-tech computer sleuthing to try and understand the cranial mechanics of bite force found in modern and prehistoric animals bite force is the amount of pressure applied when the jaws of an animal bite down on its prey what&#39;s generating the bite force here are the actual drawer closing muscles what we&#39;re looking at the is a simple lever system so we apply force on one end of the lever and we get a reaction force on the other end of the believer Rose process for understanding bite force in sharks starts with the gruesome task of cat scanning a shark head at a local hospital I then build a a surface model and from that I can then create a solid three-dimensional engineering model or finite element model from this engineering model Rho has figured out the potential maximum bite force of the modern great white shark in a case of a really big white pointer we&#39;re predicting a bite force around about four thousand pounds these largest of white pointers are really pushing the envelope as far as living animals are concerned with the bite force per inch data from the great white Roe extrapolates what he believes to be a fairly accurate understanding of the bite force of the Megalodon shark toward the upper end of estimates of body mass for Megalodon we&#39;re gaining by force estimates of about 40,000 pounds which is just humongous we&#39;re 40 thousand pounds of bite force you know bite through a truck if you had the teeth and truss to stand up to this must have been an absolutely terrifying object to anyone of course living large baleen whales get very very anxious when they see or hear orcas or killer whales but the sight of one of these guys coming coming out the must have been just absolutely horrific the baleen whale didn&#39;t have much time to be anxious once the attack had begun it would appear that Megalodon typically took out a large whales by swimming up behind them biting their tail flippers off basically just disabling the whales propulsion system all together this is certain death for the whale as he bleeds out through a gaping hole in his artery but with no hands to hold down his enormous prey how did the Megalodon keep the sixty eight thousand kilogram whale from swimming off after one bite to the belly or throat at Wright State University in Ohio by paleontologist Chuck&#39;s Ian paleo has constructed an experiment that demonstrates the deadly potential at the Megalodon to attack a giant prey item a high density gel mold will simulate whale flesh the centerpiece of the demonstration is a set of mechanical Megalodon jaws that he believes simulates the unique jaw motion of the shark&#39;s mouth these jars are really interesting because in addition to being able to lift up and down they also are highly mobile in a forward direction just like modern laminates and Megalodon would have been also the metal jewels are firmly attached to the table and instead of having the jaw attack the mold the bite is replicated by having the mold rolled into place inside the mouth the shark uses its lower teeth to initiate the attack and hold its prey in place we can see the lower teeth anchored into the flesh a good three inches it&#39;s already starting to tear the flesh this is holding down the flesh and now the top is going to make its bite the upper jaw bites down on the prey with its powerful serrated teeth at that point Megalodon would thrust back and forth until a bite was made the bottom jaw continues to anchor into the gel flesh while the unique upper jaw with its ability to move somewhat independently from the rest of the skull and takes bite after bite pulling flesh into its mouth as it continues to feed okay well we&#39;ve created heard massive wounds to our prey item we can see that the teeth have made huge couch marks have split off nearly half of the flesh now if this was the actual shark this piece of flesh would extend out in both directions probably three or four feet because of the size of the jaws and you would have probably nearly 40 teeth sinking into the flesh the mechanical jaws leave no doubt about the powerful combination of bite force and cutting power that Megalodon used on prey like the Santa Barbara Whale within minutes the whale is nothing but a tasty caucus voting south along the California coast for one more day Megalodon has found a meal a very big meal but unfortunately for Megalodon during the Pliocene epoch ocean temperatures started to cool the numbers of whale species were also diminishing megalodons reign as the all-time apex predator of the sea had been hearing it megladon disappeared from the fossil record during the Pleistocene epoch around 1.8 million years ago scientists are unsure why this efficient hunting machines time at the top of the predator list came to a close extinction is always something that fascinates people we want to know not only how things live we want to know why they died why they&#39;re no longer around why they&#39;re no longer with us the assumption there though is always that extinction is somehow the fault of the animal or the species that goes extinct that&#39;s because it was poorly adapted a negative thing that&#39;s not necessarily always the case clearly species want to perpetuate their existence paleontologists are unsure what finally killed off the shark could another apex predator like the killer whale have wiped out the Megalodon another intriguing possibility is changes in climate 6 to 1.8 million years ago just as Megalodon teeth disappeared from the fossil record scientists have noticed a cooling in the ocean temperatures this may have adversely affected a shark accustomed to swimming in warmer waters [Music] paleontologists also know that as the myosin epoch progressed the population of smaller whales was replaced by larger whales these whales may have favored colder climates to the north it might very well be that as wells became migratory and spent the summer time in northern latitudes that in fact the the Sharks just worked didn&#39;t have access to the big whales by the middle of the Pliocene without year-round access to larger prey Megalodon may have been feeling acute hunger pangs with a loss of a large portion of the whales perhaps three-quarters of all the whale species at the time who ended up losing a major food source for Megalodon the giant shark would have become increasingly desperate for food cannibalism was always a possibility with Megalodon but could have increased as other sources of food thinned smaller Megalodon teeth have been found in deposits alongside other marine mammals that were prey items for the shark there is speculation that these juvenile megalodons may have been at risk from bigger hungrier Meigs the closing of the land bridge in South America may have also affected the worldwide migratory patterns of some marine animals the disappearance of the Central American Seaway and its replacement by land bridge and the effect upon marine organisms has been debated among scientists we look at things like even the modern sperm whales the same species exist in both Atlantic and Pacific and the question is are they going around the southern continents or are they just very slow to evolve it is unclear if the closing of the Isthmus of Panama that connects North and South America could have affected Megalodon scientists continue to search for clues about Megalodon and its demise by studying the great white shark the starters the modern great white is equipped with a remarkable internal heating system known as giganto Fermi which is an excellent survival tool most fish are cold blooded and the great white is and it&#39;s warm-blooded it elevates its body temperature up above the ambient water temperature which for a long time was a characteristic solely assigned to mammals and they do that with a special system of blood vessels that actually warms the blood that supplies critical parts of the shark&#39;s sensory biology so the eyes the nose particularly paleontologists have not yet figured out if Megalodon possessed this extraordinary biological capability if they did not as temperatures cooled it&#39;s possible the great white was in a better position to withstand the dip in the ocean temperatures more importantly scientists believe having more variety in its diet probably helped the great white shark while Megalodon was primarily preying on larger marine mammals the great white was able to eat smaller prey items and fish they need less biomass to keep going they&#39;re probably not as much pressure if you will as there is on an apex predator the size of Megalodon which would mean to need a tremendous amount of biomass to maintain as its existence in essence unlike the great white megladon may well have eaten its way out of existence the great white was clearly a more adaptable animal and as a result it flourishes and oceans around the world to this day but the question of whether these two magnificent sharks were related continues to interest scientists paleontologist Chuck&#39;s Ian paleo and other experts insist there was little direct relationship between Megalodon and the great white according to sam padilla advanced computer technology underscores the differences between the two animals i think one of the things i like to see cleared up is they to allow Megalodon to be called you know Karkare Cleese Megalodon change the name separated out from the great white and let&#39;s get on with business at this point the great white tooth and the Megalodon tooth do have some markings in common both a triangular and serrated but the great white tooth and its prehistoric ancestor have little or no scar at the base whereas the Megalodon clearly has a prominent Chevron shaped scar and blowing up the great white tooth to the same height of a Megalodon tooth reveals that even at the same length the great white fossil tooth is noticeably thinner and more grassle than the Megalodon tooth well let me let me do the converse here let me show you a very small Megalodon about approximately the same size as this great white and you can see that small sizes the Megalodon doesn&#39;t look the same again the serration densities are different this tooth is distinct from this great white no matter how big you make it the team compared the dentition of the modern great white the extinct mako and make little and what we found consistently was weather would not we looked at the root the blade or the entire tooth was that the extinct mako and great white always clustered together for every tooth position while Megalodon always clustered away Megalodon their great white are not directly related Megalodon is not the extinct great white and all scientific evidence points to this what does it looking all the way back to the first jaw recreation in 1909 there are scientists who still insist the great white shark is more directly related to the Megalodon The Smoking Gun rare fossilized Megalodon vertebra backbone anatomy suggests that Megalodon and great whites are quite closely related to one another these researchers are turning to work being done on the centra of Megalodon vertebrae to support this theory I think because the vertebral centra haven&#39;t been as thoroughly studied they provide some very important clues and I think they they ought to be studied very carefully but Megalodon centra are not common worldwide for the 16 or 17 million years that it lived we probably have on the order of a dozen to two dozen vertebral centra of Megalodon preserved it&#39;ll be some time before scientists can collect more comprehensive data in this area perhaps the information locked inside the vertebral centra can finally answer the question of whether or not negligence legacy lives on in the great white shark one point everyone agrees on is that there is much more to learn about the physical makeup and behavior of Megalodon and one thing is certain the unique combination of physical size tooth shape jaw strength and appetite created an animal unique in the 400 million year history of sharks big tooth is still the all-time king at the sea

Transcript for:Megalodon - The Apex Predator of the Prehistoric Oceans

Transcript for:
Megalodon - The Apex Predator of the Prehistoric Oceans