Teeth are also the hardest part of a shark's skeleton. This means that shark teeth are continuously raining down onto the ocean floor, increasing the chance that they will get fossilised. Depending on what they eat, sharks lose a set of teeth every one to two weeks, getting through up to 40,000 teeth in their lifetime. Sharks continually produce teeth throughout their entire lives. Are megalodon teeth rare?Īlmost all fossil remains of megalodon are teeth. They can even be found in the UK near Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex,' says Emma, although they are extremely rare in the UK and tend to be of poor quality. 'They are also quite common off the coast of Morocco and parts of Australia. This is likely due in part to the age of the rocks, but also because they can easily be found on the sea floor allowing collectors to go diving for them. 'We can find lots of their teeth off the east coast of North America, along the coasts and at the bottom of saltwater creeks and rivers of North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida,' explains Emma. The species was so widely spread that megalodon teeth have been found on every continent except Antarctica. megalodon was adapted to warm tropical and subtropical locations around the globe. Some scientists think they might even have been in competition with each other,' says Emma. 'As we've found more and more fossils, we've realised that the ancestor to the great white shark lived alongside megalodon. But the evolutionary history of this shark is thought to stretch back to Cretalamna appendiculata, dating to 105 million years old - making the lineage of megalodon over 100 million years old. The oldest definitive ancestor of megalodon is a 55-million-year-old shark known as Otodus obliquus, which grew to around 10 metres in length. 'We now know that this is not the case, and megalodon is actually from a different lineage of shark of which megalodon was the last member.' 'A lot of reconstructions have megalodon looking like a bigger version of the great white shark because for a long time people thought they were related,' explains Emma.

Like the blue shark, it also had extra-long pectoral fins to support its weight and size. megalodon likely had a much shorter nose, or rostrum, when compared with the great white, with a flatter, almost squashed jaw. Most reconstructions show megalodon looking like an enormous great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias. These teeth can tell us a lot, such as what these massive animals ate. In fact, the word megalodon simply means 'large tooth'. Megalodon teeth can reach 18 centimetres long. Without a complete megalodon skeleton to measure, these figures are based on tooth size.

It may have been comparable in length to today's biggest whale sharks, the largest of which has measured in at 18.8 metres. But in reality, these animals were a little shorter than the 23-metre-long fictional monster it depicted.Įstimates suggest megalodon actually grew to between 15 and 18 metres in length, three times longer than the largest recorded great white shark. This giant shark is well-known for starring in the 2018 megalodon movie, The Meg. megalodon was not only the biggest shark in the world, but one of the largest fish ever to exist. For the next 13 million years the enormous shark dominated the oceans until becoming extinct just 3.6 million years ago. The earliest megalodon fossils ( Otodus megalodon, previously known as Carcharodon or Carcharocles megalodon) date to 20 million years ago.

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