The Meg, star of page and screen, is everybody's favorite extinct shark because it simply dwarfs every other predatory shark that ever lived. So how big was it? Estimates of about 14 meters (m) all the way to 18m and larger have been made, with it getting larger in fiction: Steve Alten's Meg is a sardine compared to the 200-foot (!) shark in a novel by Charles Wilson called Extinct.
The most thorough analysis done to date on Otodus megalodon (formerly Carcharodon megalodon) is now out. Scientists Jack Cooper, Catalina Pimiento, Humberto Ferron, and Michael Benton went beyond earlier reconstructions based mainly on teeth and scaling up the Great White (Carcharodon carcharias) and folded in analysis of "extant macropredatory lamniforms," the order that includes the mako shark. The lamniforms are the closest living relatives to Meg: the great white is a more distant cousin. This analysis allowed them to get a sense of the body proportions common to such fish.
They came out with a max length of about 16m (52.5 feet). Other dimensions: "Our results suggest that a 16 m †O. megalodon likely had a head ~ 4.65 m long, a dorsal fin ~ 1.62 m tall and a tail ~ 3.85 m high." (The great white, easily the biggest predatory shark of today, tops out arouind 6.5 m for proven specimens, with possibly 7 m for an extreme outlier.)
It's not the mosnter we saw in the recent film, but it will do!
1 comment:
You missed that study Matt :
https://palaeo-electronica.org/content/2021/3284-estimating-lamniform-body-size
Max estimated size is 20 m.
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