![]() ![]() “Ocean food webs do tend to be longer than the grass-deer-wolf food chain of land animals, because you start with such small organisms,” says Kast. There is evidence of cannibalism in both megatooth sharks and other prehistoric marine predators. Helping megalodon on its way to the top of the food web is cannibalism. So high is their trophic signature that the researchers believe megalodon must have eaten other predators and predators-of-predators in a complicated food web. Kast and Sigman’s team discovered clear evidence that megalodon and its ancestors occupied the highest rung of the prehistoric food chain – called the highest “trophic level”. “If Megalodon existed in the modern ocean, it would thoroughly change humans’ interaction with the marine environment,” adds senior author Danny Sigman, professor of geological and geophysical sciences at Princeton. “But megalodon and the other megatooth sharks were genuinely enormous carnivores that ate other predators, and Meg went extinct only a few million years ago.” “We’re used to thinking of the largest species – blue whales, whale sharks, even elephants and diplodocuses – as filter feeders or herbivores, not predators,” says the paper’s lead author, geoscientist Emma Kast, now based at the University of Cambridge, UK. More on palaeontology: Giant predatory dinosaur fossils discovered in Egypt and Britain The results of the research, published in Science Advances, indicate this ancient shark was an apex predator with no comparison in all of Earth’s history. No surprise then that recent research by palaeontologists at Princeton University in the US has shown that megalodon ate whatever it wanted – including other predators. ![]() Individual teeth were the size of an adult human hand. These monsters had jaws so wide a human could stand in them. While its exact size is subject to debate, based on fossil teeth, megalodon may have been 15-18 metres long – three to four times the dimensions of the biggest great white sharks. The largest predatory shark and biggest fish known to science was megalodon, which ruled the seas until around 3 million years ago. In one form or another, sharks have patrolled Earth’s oceans for over 400 million years – since long before even the dinosaurs. And some were far more deadly than others. While this sort of negative press certainly doesn’t help conservation efforts today, there is some truth to this lethal impression of these magnificent beasts. Sharks are often described as perfect killing machines. ![]()
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