The Magnificent Meg returns

 The extinct shark Megalodon never ceases to amaze and enthrall. And so it's coming around again, in  film, fact, and fandom. 

The trailer for Meg 2 is out, and it's everything thriller fans want. It's also nothing that fans of accurate want. With its ever-bigger, roaring kaiju sharks, it looks like the most expensive SyFy Channel movie ever made. It opens with a Meg nabbing a T. rex in the shallows. This chronological no-no appeared in Steve Alten's original Meg novel. A 2018 reissue retconned it into a simulation people were watching. The movie, it appears, claims Meg has been the ultimate predator for 65 million years, so they're going to play it straight.

Meg tooth (author's collection)

Another trailer made me ask, "What are tentacles doing in my shark movie?" Apparently, the habitat that sheltered Meg until a rift opened also housed the kraken, and some weird amphibian-looking things the size of crocodiles as well.  There's a bit of irony here. While kraken tales go back a thousand years or more, the latest resurgence of the term came courtesy of a paleontologist who thinks there really was such an animal. As far as I can tell, Mark McMenamin is the only paleontologist in the entire world who thinks there was a gigantic Triassic cephalopod.  But his claim made in 2011, amplified in 2013, was embraced by author Max Hawthorne, whose novels share the prehistoric sea monster niche with Alten's, and thus gained wider awareness.  This was based on two instances of bones that seemed to be artificially arranged, and what looked to him like the beak of a gigantic octopus. No one else accepts either piece of evidence. The Meg movie is opting for a monster squid rather than an octopus.

The movie looks like good silly fun.  Jason Statham seems to have honed his sense of humor (a bit stilted in the first film to me) and everyone else is back.  The sharks is bigger and it brought company, so just enjoy.

 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!