At three times the size of the modern great white shark, the jaw of the massive prehistoric megalodon could reach up to 3 meters.
Carcharocles megalodon is considered the largest shark species ever known to exist. At sizes up to 18 meters (59 feet) long, the giant sharks are said to have stalked the seas during the Miocene and Pliocene geological time periods between 23 million and 2.6 million years ago before going extinct.
According to the University of Zurich, climate change has generally been blamed for megalodon’s disappearance, but a team of researchers led by Catalina Pimiento from the university's paleontological institute and museum have discovered that the giant sharks likely went extinct due to changes in their food source and competition from other predators.
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“We were not able to ascertain any direct link between the extinction of C. megalodon and the global fluctuations in temperatures during this time,” Pimiento said in a news release. “Changing climatic conditions do not appear to have had any influence on the population density and range of the giant sharks.”
According to the university, Pimiento’s team analyzed 200 megalodon records from museums and databases across the world to reconstruct the shark’s habitat range. They found in the early Miocene, up to approximately 16 million years ago, the sharks were mainly found in the Northern Hemisphere in the warm waters off the coast of America, Europe and in the Indian Ocean, before expanding along the Asian, Australian and South American coasts. The species reached their greatest numbers during the middle Miocene, while their largest geographical coverage occurred in the late Miocene.
The team’s findings, published in the Journal of Biogeography, state that the species entered a continuous decline around 5 million years ago, with the gradual emergence of a glacial period during the Pliocene. However, the report argues that temperature fluctuations during this period were not the cause of their extinction. Rather, the loss of smaller marine life that the mega sharks fed upon, as well as competition with the ancestors of today’s great white sharks and killer whales, made food even more scarce and may have been the dominant factor in their extinction.
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