I enjoy Shark Week even though I know they are dramatizing the handful of shark attacks on people, which are almost bizarrely rare given the number of people in the water on the world's beaches. (Of course, the fact that we are dramatically reducing the number of sharks every year may be part of it, too.)
Now I love Megalodon, easily in my Top 3 extinct animals (with Dunkleosteus terrelli and, of course, T. rex.) But the key word is extinct. If Discovery wanted to make a fiction "mockumentary," they should have said at the beginning that that's what it was. Just as on their mermaid shows, they're going to send speculation rocketing around the internet that a living Meg is real.
Viewers deserve better than this. Hell, the shark deserves better than this.
(I leaned toward Meg too speculatively in my 1995 book Rumors of Existence, BTW. My fault. And one of Loren's Coleman's field guides said I was a partisan of the living-Meg hypothesis - part Loren's fault, but also part mine. To be clear: There ain't no Meg. Sadly.)
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