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Science Wednesday: MEGALODON!

Hi £ers of the Silver ‘n Black sea! How ya doing this Wednesday? I hope very well! I gotta tell you that I went for a couple of hours to the beach this morning and the weather was fan-tas-tic.

El_Alambique_IslaVerde

And while I was down looking and daydreaming toward the endless blue horizon, thought about an interesting and very timely topic for this Science Wednesday. These past days, errrbody is talking about Shark Week. Even Becky Hammon is "Shark Weeking". Shark Week for breakfast! Shark Week for lunch! Shark Week for dinner! Ok we get it! Its awesome! SO, let's talk about sharks! Because this is Pounding the Rock, we won't be talking about regular Sharks but the biggest of them all, the extinct MEGALODON! Aha, that's right!

Escala_Megalodon_por_Scarlet_Bonkosky

Chart made by Scarlet Bonkosky

Did you know? The name Megalodon means "Mighty/Big Tooth"?!? Oh yeah, spooky. The average Megalodon tooth measured 6.6 inches and are the largest in size of any known shark species! It had a 46 front row teeth (6 rows total), 24 in the upper jaw and 22 in the lower, having about 276 teeth at any given time. L.Suárez, officially you've got competition!

Dientes_megalodon_Foto_Magnus_Manske

Photo by Magnus Manske

At an estimate of 58 feet long and about 77 tons body mass, the Megalodon is regarded as one of the largest and most powerful predators in vertebrate history! Also, according to the discovered evidences the Megalodon sharks lived from approximately 17 to 2 million years ago. But where did the Megalodon live?!? Ah, they are described as a cosmopolitan species! Being a warm water shark, it means they were distributed between Earth's sub-tropical latitudes and they were known to migrate great distances possibly in search of their prey. This fact came to the fore when teeth of these species were found throughout most of the ancient oceans of the Globe. Even though they were adapted to cover almost all water niches including sandy littorals, coastal upwelling, shallow waters, and offshore deep waters, the adults mostly lived in the pelagic zone of the ocean or the column of water that is neither close to the bottom nor near the surface.

And what did they eat?!? Everything BIG enough! Some scientists estimate that Megalodon ate about 2,500 pounds of food every day including ancient whales, dolphins, squids, fishes, bowhead whales, porpoises, giant turtles, pinnipeds, sperm whales (Moby-Dick), squalodontids, cetotherrids, and rorquals! Talk about the apex of the apex predator in the Ocean. Based on its size, Megalodon bite force has been estimated at 10.8 - 18.2 tons approximately which means they could EASILY crush the skull of some ancient whales. Yikes! For comparison, an adult Great White shark have a bite force of about 1.8 tons, a wolf 1,200 pounds, Mastiff dog 552 pounds, Pit-Bull 338 pounds and Humans averages 120 pound of bite force.

Reconstructed Megalodon jaw at L'Aquarium (Barcelona, Spain)

Megalodon_Jaw_BCN

Photo by me :)

I know it said "No Pictures", but it was impossible to resist!

Did Megalodon sharks lived w/ aquatic Dinosaurs?!? Actually, NO. There are some misconceptions about Megalodon sharks and one of them is that they lived in the same period as non-feathered dinosaurs. But non-feathered dinosaurs as the Plesiosaurus and the T-Rex went extinct 65 million years ago (MYA) approximately, while the Megalodon evolved just 20 MYA. The other misconception is that the Megalodon didn't live at the same time as Humans. Modern humans have only been around for 200,000 years approximately and the Megalodon went extinct 2 MYA!

While not yet resolved if Megalodon is directly related to the great white shark or if it was an evolutionary "dead-end", its known the Megalodon shark modern closest living relatives are the makos, porbeagles and great whites.

That's all for today terrestrial creatures of the world! Have a soothing afternoon and don't drink too much!

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