Megalodon, the Neogen Terror, dominated its giant shark niche for just 20 million years before disappearing from the world’s oceans.
And during that time he hunted everything and everything that crossed his path. No different: if it was big enough to be a breakfast, megalodone (Waiting for megalodone) Partook.
Scientists have come to this conclusion after learning the teeth of modern sharks and comparing them to the fossilized teeth of Megalodon, almost everything that is left of the missing fish today.
This contradicts the theory that megalodon’s main prey is whales. Certainly megalodon could and ate whales – but his diet was generally far more opted.
“Our study is more recently to paint a picture of megalodone as an environmentally friendly generalist,” says Geolo McCormak of Gotte Frankfurt University in Germany, “Megalodon was flexible enough to feed on marine mammals and large fish.
Megalodone tooth (left) compared to the tooth of a white shark (right). (Mark Kostich/Istock/Getty Images Plus)
Megalodon is a disappeared shark species that lived from about 23 million to about 3.6 million years, during which time it occupied an excellent position at the top of the food network before it was driven until it disappeared. We will never understand for sure what it looks like; Like all sharks, his skeleton was mostly cartilage and everything that left behind was many teeth and a few vertebrae.
We know from these remains that Megalodone was huge, with size ratings ranging from about 11 meters to over 40 meters (36 to 131 feet) with a length (although the latter is external and most estimates move about 13 to 20 meters). This is huge – so huge that scientists believe that megalodone may specialize in great prey.
One way to determine the diet of someone who has been dead for a long time is to watch isotopes in your teeth. The isotope of an element is an atom that deviates from the norm in the number of neutrons it has in its nucleus, and the proportions of these isotopes vary depending on several factors, one of which is a diet.
This is because when we eat, some of the metals in our food replace some of the calcium in your teeth and bones – not to notice, obviously, but enough to leave tracking. McCormak and his colleagues specifically looked at the ratios of two zinc-slightest zinc-64 and heavier zinc-66 isotopes.
When eating fish at the bottom of the food network, they store less zinc-66 than zinc-64. The fish that eat these fish have even less zinc-66. So when you reach the fish at the very top of the chain, you see the least Zinc-66 compared to zinc-64. This is what researchers observed in the teeth of Megalodon and his cousin who disappeared Waiting chubutensisS
Researchers do not really know what was at the bottom of the food chain 18 million years ago, the time from which megalodone teeth studied. So, they compared Megalodon’s teeth to the teeth of the sharks that today swim the oceans to understand what giant predators eat.
“The marine plaque, which feeds on mussels, snails and crustaceans, forms the largest level of the food chain we have studied,” says McCormak.
“The smaller types of sharks such as Requiem sharks and ancestors of today’s cetaceans, dolphins and whales were next. Larger sharks such as sand tiger sharks were on the food pyramid, and on top were giant sharks like Aralosalayus cuspidatus and Otodus Sharks that include megalodone. “
Megalodon’s status as a superpower at the very top of the Food Network was created earlier. The new study reveals that the difference in isotope between megalodone and the animals at the lowest level that researchers have examined is not a sharp outline, suggesting that the shark is not a vain eater.
There were also intriguing differences in the megalodone diet, depending on where the animals lived. Megalodon teeth found in Passau, Germany, dinner at the lower levels of the food network, the researchers found.
This is no different from the opportunistic hunting approach demonstrated by white sharks (Carcharias Carcharodon) that stands on reason: the previous work, led by McCormak, has shown that the rise of the white shark is probably one of the drivers who led megalodone to disappearance. With the competition in his ecological niche, Megalodon became more vulnerable.
“This gives us an important idea of how marine communities have changed for geological times,” says paleobiologist Kenshu Shimada of Depol University in the United States, “but more important is the fact that even” supercarcars “are not immunized against disappearance.”
The study has been published in Earth and planetary scientific lettersS