Cartilaginous fish · Lamniformes · Otodontidae

Megalodon

Otodus megalodon

Extinct

No living individual remains anywhere in the world. See full glossary

The megalodon is an extinct species of shark that lived between roughly 19.8 and 3.6 million years ago, during the Cenozoic. It was formerly thought to be a member of the family Lamnidae and a close relative of the great white shark. Today, however, there is almost unanimous consensus that it belongs to the genus Otodus, of the extinct family Otodontidae, which separated from the ancestry of the great white shark during the Early Cretaceous, and that it should therefore be called Otodus megalodon.

Weight

30 t – 60 t

Size

10 m – 18 m

Lifespan

90 years

Diet

Carnivore

Feeds mainly on other animals.

Activity

Diurnal

Active mainly during the day.

Social structure

Solitary

Lives and hunts alone, joining others only to breed.

Sighting difficulty

Impossible (extinct)

OceanCarnivore Diurnal Solitary Fish Ocean

Fun facts

GeneralThe largest shark that ever lived, at 15 to 18 m; it died out some 3.6 million years ago.
Its teeth are more than seventeen centimetres long and are so abundant in deposits around the world that in the Middle Ages they were taken for petrified dragons' tongues and used as charms against poison.
It is known almost solely from teeth and vertebrae: a shark's skeleton is cartilaginous and does not fossilise, so its size and shape are reconstructed from comparisons with living species.
Its extinction, some three and a half million years ago, is linked to the cooling of the oceans, the decline of its prey and competition from emerging predators such as the ancestral killer whale and the great white shark.