The megalodon has been nonextant for millions of year , but the vast prehistoric shark still trance hoi polloi today . achieve 50 feet long , it ’s thought to be the largest shark to ever haunt the ocean , but according to a new survey , the predatory animal may have been impart down by conversant beast : the great white shark .
AsSmithsonianreports , the psychoanalysis , published in the journalPeerJ , finds that the megalodon may have vanished from seas much earlier that previously believed . Past research showed that the last megalodons died roughly 2.6 million years ago , a sentence when other maritime life was dying off in turgid number , possibly due to a supernova blasting Earth with irradiation at the ending of the Pliocene epoch .
A team of fossilist and geologist revisited the fossils that this conclusion was originally based on for their new study . They rule that many of the megalodon remains had beenmislabeled , marked with imprecise dates , or go out using old techniques . After reassessing the specimens , they conclude that the specie had likely last extinct at least 1 million years earlier than preceding inquiry indicate .
If the megalodon vanished 3.6 million years ago rather than 2.6 million years ago , it was n’t the victim of supernova radiation therapy . One known component that could explain the loss of the 13 million - year - sometime apex predator at this time is the ascension of a newfangled competitor : thegreat lily-white shark . This predator come on the shot around the same time as the megalodon ’s decay , and though a full - grown smashing ashen shark is less than half the size of a mature megalodon , the specie still would have been a stressor . Adult neat Andrew Dickson White probably competed with juvenile megalodons , and with the megalodon ’s favorite prey — diminished whales — becoming scarce at this meter , this may have been enough to wipe the megalodons from world .
Even if great blanched shark finally ticktock megalodons for ascendence in the ocean , the megalodon ’s status as one of the most fearsome predators of all time should n’t be contested . The behemoth shark had7 - inch teethand a bite stronger than that of aT. rex .
[ h / tSmithsonian ]
