By now, I am sure you have heard of the infamous Megalodon. With films out like The Meg, it is hard to have never heard of this massive creature. It was said to be a gargantuan shark that ruled the world's oceans millions of years ago. Now, researchers and scientists have discovered that it was not the only giant in the ocean. Researchers recently found evidence of a monstrous shark that existed even before the infamous Megalodon.
What Is The Monstrous Shark That Existed Before Megalodon?
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This creature existed in the age of the dinosaurs, even before the bus-sized Megalodon. Experts claim that this monstrous shark "prowled the waters off what's now northern Australia, during the Cretaceous period." The NY Post shared that researchers made this claim after a recent discovery. They found huge vertebrae on a beach near the city of Darwin. After studying it, those researchers are now arguing that "the creature is the earliest known mega-predator of the modern shark lineage." Additionally, they argued that this monstrous shark would have lived "15 million years earlier than enormous sharks found before."
So just how big was this monstrous shark? It was larger than the great white sharks of today. While the average great white today ranges around 20 feet long, this beast came in around 26 feet long. Imagine adding an additional six feet to a great white, no thank you! This is not the first time that there has been fossil evidence of this creature. However, the Post shared that older studies had been "somewhat overlooked." Experts do not plan on making that mistake again. Benjamin Kear, the senior curator in paleobiology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, shared the importance of these findings.
"The importance of vertebrae is they give us hints about size," Kear said. "If you're trying to scale it from teeth, it's difficult. Are the teeth big and the bodies small? Are they big teeth with big bodies?" While it is difficult to deduce a precise size of the monstrous shark from the past, Kear had this to say. "It would've looked for all the world like a modern, gigantic shark, because this is the beauty of it. This is a body model that has worked for 115 million years, like an evolutionary success story."
