What Did Megalodon Really Look Like?

megalodon is one of the most infamous of all prehistoric animals that has ever been discovered with the idea of a giant hyper predatory shark having an understandable appeal to many people but for all its fame there's still a great deal of uncertainty as to what exactly this beast looked like deta Megalodon really resembled a giant version of a great white shark probably not as we'll see first it's important to look back at the different classifications and evolutionary placements that have been suggested for this animal since Megalodon was a shock and shock fossils are notoriously incomplete due to the skeletons composition of cartilage not bone the remains of Megalodon that are actually known to science are only teeth and some vertebrae still a surprising amount of information can be told from these alone just not an overall complete and definite picture of life appearance however we can still make inferences about this based on the living animals is related to when paleontologists first started examining the evolutionary relationships of these giant shark teeth the original idea was that the creature they had once belonged to must have been a close relative of the modern-day great white shark carcharodon Carcharias this was due to the overall similar morphology between the teeth of sub adult Megalodon and the teeth of great whites a quick look at examples from both organisms reveal many commonalities with one of the only main noticeable differences being the size therefore Megalodon was classed as being related to the great white and even as being a possible ancestor to this modern species so the mega shark was named carcharodon Megalodon however today it's generally agreed by many workers that these similarities in morphology are unaffected out to convergent evolution and not an indication of a close evolutionary relationship it's therefore highly unlikely that Megalodon would have appeared exactly like a scaled up white shark when alive so if this was likely not the correct evolutionary placement at least according to a significant group of shark experts what is then this is still a fairly complicated topic but I'll attempt to simplify the situation essentially you can boil it down to two contrasting schools of thought however there are details of the exact proposed relationships that vary within them firstly there's the position I've just described in which Megalodon is a member of the genus carcharodon along with the great white and both are derived from a shark called orientalis and both are part of the shock family lamb today then there's the suggestion that the great white is in fact more closely related to the mako shark the genus acerous and Megalodon is derived from the genus otakus and belongs to a different family to the great white Oh to dawn today therefore in this case the Mega Shark is known as Kaka rockeries Megalodon and carcharodon orientalis is actually moved to the genus paleo carcharodon which did not end up giving rise to any living sharks these days it seems as though most people are in favor of the second placement due to the fairly good evidence of subtle morphological differences between the teeth of Megalodon and great whites and the relative weaknesses that can be found in the evidence for their close relationship however there was also a study published in 2016 which found that the genus otakus which the clock Rock Lee's genus is derived from is actually paraphyletic meaning it doesn't include all the taxa that evolved from a single common ancestor this is a situation that is generally best avoided in taxonomy and evolutionary biology and so to fix it the researchers recommended that the members of Kok Rock Lee's should be included in ODIs making Megalodon Oh Dada smuggler dawn there have additionally been some other suggestions for where Megalodon should be placed amongst shark attacks on what exactly his name should be such as otitis mega Psilakis Megalodon but let's just focus on the main more widely accepted proposals we've looked at here first we'll entertain the idea of Megalodon being a giant version of a great white shark a lot of the Paleo artwork produced of this animal in the past has been based on the assumption that this would be the correct way to view the shark due to the similarities in teeth we've already discussed and with the old placement within the karkarodon genus this would seem like a logical assessment to make however even if Megalodon was actually closely related to sea car carriers it probably wouldn't have looked like a scaled up version anyway since the reconstruction is by scientists who at the time thought the animal was in the genus carcharodon revealed that Megalodon would have been stouter than expected as well as possessing a wider more domed head and a blunter snout than a white shark the pectoral fins of this extinct creature were also suggested to have been similar in shape to those of a great white but while being proportionally larger and thicker in order to support the extra mass it's also been said by some authors to have had quite deep set eyes giving it an almost pig eyes look of course this exact view of megalodon life appearance is no longer thought to be the right one with the shifting evolutionary placements of the organism came a reassessment of how we should consider as physical characteristics and since it's no longer aligned with carcharodon it now seems relatively unlikely that it was just a larger more robust and stocky great white one interesting alternative suggestion then which has been proposed by Jacques researcher R Aidan Martin is that Megalodon could have looked like some sort of giant sand tiger shark this idea is based on the similarities scene between otakus teeth and the teeth of the stout toothed sand tiger shark otice teeth have actually been described as being more similar to sand Tigers than to those of the great white and seeing as in the model of Megalodon evolution we've looked at this creature descended from ODIs there's perhaps some credibility to the notion that maybe Megalodon looked similar to this modern taxon this is further supported by the fact that within the living lamb noid or mackerel sharks the santa Gulag form appears in four different lineages suggesting that perhaps this body plan is actually ancestral to the whole clade and the more familiar shape of members of lamb naday such as the great white he's in fact a specialized form that has possibly only evolved a single time in sharks so by assuming that the Megalodon ancestor otakus possessed a scent like a shark like body plan and that this body plan was retained to some degree by the latest species derived from the genus it has been inferred that Megalodon itself looked more like a very robust sand tiger shark with massive teeth however there are of course some problems with this concept from a functional morphology perspective it's been stated that an animal at the size of Megalodon and which swims by flexing its body to propel itself would be physically unable to ever evolve a body shape like a sand tiger shark this is because the sand tiger has an acceleration body plan which enables the Sharks to displace water through the use of drag when they swim but this method of displacement means that a mass of water several times the size of their own body mass must be moved with every tail stroke and that the dimensions Megalodon was reaching this would become a real issue a sand tiger shark the size of Megalodon would need absolutely huge pectoral fins for supporting all the additional mass but these fins would in turn produce a great deal of drag that would hinder the animal from swimming effectively therefore a biomechanical can be made against the Giants an Tiger form which then proposes that the mega shock would instead have a tail end more like that seen in cruising body forms such as whale sharks basking sharks tunas whales mako sharks and yes white sharks this proposed body form includes a tail fin that is almost lunate or crescent-shaped very small second dorsal and anal fins and a key on either side of the caudal peduncle the region of the body where the tail attaches this morphology all aids a great deal in reducing the drag of these organisms when swimming so according to this argument the back half of Megalodon at least may actually have convergently evolved to resemble the great white shark after all but not because they're closely related instead because this is the shape that's needed for effective underwater locomotion and axial swimmers once a large body size is achieved the front half of Megalodon though could still have been very distinct many of you have probably come across this striking image before produced by deviantART user q Bolivians I'm probably saying that wrong this particular reconstruction is based on the classification of Megalodon within the ODIs or cargo release genus the thinking here is that with a more distant relation to the great white and inhabiting a different niche the shark would evolve to look very different with relatively much smaller eyes an incredibly bulky look and a very short snout to prevent it from getting in the way when the animal slammed its mouth into the big bodied prey it fed on additionally it's been given an enlarged tail fin two reasons to be to provide enough propulsion to move the huge mass of the animal through the water while this is undoubtedly some excellent paleo art and a remarkably imaginative speculative vision of this creatures life appearance it's probably not completely accurate but it does follow a lot of the arguments for Megalodon life appearance that we've discussed so it seems like it's a pretty good start for imagining what a drastically unusual and unexpected Megalodon could have looked like the shortened snout is a fairly reasonable speculation which has even appeared before in previous reconstructions as I mentioned earlier and it makes sense to assume that it could potentially make preying on large bodied animals such as cetaceans easier for the shark the increased bulk to seems logical and has been suggested before but whether or not it was bulky to the extent shown here is up for the tail end of the shark also appears to be quite close to the cruising form that has been suggested for the creature the reduced second dorsal and anal fins are good and the caudal peduncle is quite thin with a tail fin also being fairly lunate as has been proposed however the reconstruction doesn't seem to possess keels on the caudal peduncle which are found in other cruisers such as the whale shark there are likely other problems to be identified with this reconstruction depending on what exact classification of magneton you favor as well as what you might consider oldest and his ancestors to have most closely resembled but overall I at least think this could be a decent interpretation of one possible look for this animal so as you can see there's not exactly a clear easy answer to this question but many different lines of evidence to consider that have led various shark researchers to their own conclusions of Megalodon life appearance based on the evidence available and favorable to them hopefully this video has done an okay job of introducing you to a few of the different points of view that have been suggested in the past but I'm reluctant to say that any one of these is the most accurate vision of what Megalodon really looks like as future discoveries could and hopefully will quickly overturn these older ideas and reveal the true form of this ancient predator but thanks to the unfortunately load preservation potential of shark body remains we are for now at least stuck with informed estimates of this mighty creatures true life appearance but perhaps someday and nice and complete Megalodon fossil will be found and will have a much better understanding of this issue perhaps such a fossil has even already been discovered there were actually reports last year of the fossilized remains of a juvenile Megalodon body existing with the specimen apparently having been kept in a private collection but now being located in the Soria Museum in Zurich this specimen has yet to be described so there is counting next to no information available in the internet other than that it exists but if this really is a Megalodon juvenile it will hopefully shed a great deal of information on the true look of the animal so we may not have to wait much longer before we get to see the real Megalodon or you know maybe they're still out there alive anyway waiting to be found not really though you can watch last year's Megalodon shark week video for more on that well I hope this video was entertaining and informative enough and I really hope you've enjoyed this year's Shark Week make sure to let us know if you'd like us to do this again next year and feel free to leave any suggestions you might have for what shark themes or videos we should do next time thank you so much for watching this video if you would like to find out more about our world its history and the wonderful life that surrounds us all please feel free to subscribe to the channel if you think we deserve it and if you would like to see more from us you

Channel: Ben G Thomas

Views: 243,393

Rating: 4.9064798 out of 5

Keywords: Biology, Science, Paleontology, Palaeontology, Dinosaurs, Animals, Nature, Wildlife, Ben, Thomas, Prehistory, Anatomy, Fossil, Bones, News, 7Daysofscience, Days, of

Id: SEuBvAD9ZXY

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 04 2019