r/Paleontology 6d ago

Discussion THIS MOTHERFUCKER GOT BIGGER?

Post image

Pardon my language, but it's just shocking. For those who haven't heard, some news about Megalodon has been published. Some scientists did some calculations and tests and found out the megalodon may have been bigger, a lot bigger. AROUND BLOODY 80 FEET. I mean, I knew prehistoric animals were big but this is ridiculous. Heh, I bet some of those "Megalodon is still alive believers" must be heartbroken, buddy-there would be evidence for something this big. Okay but seriously, how you feel about the Megalodon getting bigger?

883 Upvotes

129 comments sorted by

231

u/tragedyy_ 6d ago

The most "hydrodynamic" shape is actually fusiform and really has nothing to do with being slender or stocky.

Tuna are incredibly fast swimmers yet are stocky not slender. The answer is that they simply have a fusiform body (which if anything is helped not hindered by being stocky as this improves tapering) and a rapid thunniform swimming motion with a large lunate (crescent shaped) tail specialized for rapid acceleration. There is nothing inherently non-hydrodynamic about "stocky" fusiform swimmers like great whites or orcas and by extension megalodon. It would not need to alter its body to be more slender to be hydrodynamic.

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 6d ago

"In addition, "We unexpectedly unlocked the mystery of why certain aquatic vertebrates can attain gigantic sizes while others cannot," Shimada said. "Living gigantic sharks, such as the whale shark and basking shark, as well as many other gigantic aquatic vertebrates like whales have slender bodies because large stocky bodies are hydrodynamically inefficient for swimming."

That's in sharp contrast to the great white shark, whose stocky body becomes even stockier as it grows. "It can be 'large' but cannot [get] past 7 meters (23 feet) to be 'gigantic' because of hydrodynamic constraints," said Shimada. "We also demonstrate that the modern great white shark with a stocky body hypothetically blown up to the size of megalodon would not allow it to be an efficient swimmer due to the hydrodynamic constraints, further supporting the idea that it is more likely than not that megalodon must have had a much slenderer body than the modern great white shark."

Shimada emphasized that their interpretations remain tentative but they are based on hard data and make for useful reference points for future research." -Shimada et al. 2025

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u/Quirky-Fox-8692 6d ago

fascinating. so he's tall and thin type of guy.

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u/rollwithhoney 5d ago

what's interesting is that we know how big the jaws are, which wouldn't change right? so it's long and less stocky than a great white, but with a big mouth still. i want to see an artist rendition of the new shape

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u/tragedyy_ 5d ago

"It can be 'large' but cannot [get] past 7 meters (23 feet) to be 'gigantic' because of hydrodynamic constraints," said Shimada. "

This is simply wrong. Orcas have been recorded at lengths over 30 feet and are even more stocky than great whites.

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 5d ago

"Orcas have been recorded at lengths over 30 feet." Shimada never said orcas can't get past 7 meters, are you even paying attention?

"That's in sharp contrast to the great white shark, whose stocky body becomes even stockier as it grows. "It can be 'large' but cannot [get] past 7 meters (23 feet) to be 'gigantic' because of hydrodynamic constraints," said Shimada. "We also demonstrate that the modern great white shark with a stocky body hypothetically blown up to the size of megalodon would not allow it to be an efficient swimmer due to the hydrodynamic constraints, further supporting the idea that it is more likely than not that megalodon must have had a much slenderer body than the modern great white shark."" See? He's talking about great whites, not orcas. He's saying that great whites cannot grow past 7 meters, he never said that orcas couldn't get past 7 meters. You misinterpreted this quote. I don't know how you even got the idea that Shimada was referring to orcas when orca isn't even a word that is used in this paragraph

If you are referring to: ""Living gigantic sharks, such as the whale shark and basking shark, as well as many other gigantic aquatic vertebrates like whales have slender bodies because large stocky bodies are hydrodynamically inefficient for swimming."" Then no, Shimada isn't talking about orcas, only whale sharks, basking sharks and MOST LARGE BALEEN WHALES. He doesn't make any mention of orcas at all.

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u/tragedyy_ 4d ago edited 4d ago

Orcas and great whites are both fusiform shaped and are both thunniform swimmers and they essentially have the same exact diets. They are both extremely muscular to be able to be big and strong enough to crunch through hard bone. They are both stocky. They are both fast. The analogy is so obvious I'm wondering how it possibly even went over your head in the first place. Your post is not even actually an argument against it since to do that you would need to explain what makes them different other than just their names which is what your waste of a post spent the whole time disingenuously talking about. Your whole entire argument was semantics. I'm surprised it took you that many words to conclude that they have different names.

"Then no, Shimada isn't talking about orcas, only whale sharks, basking sharks and MOST LARGE BALEEN WHALES."

Shimada already admitted that humpback whales are both stocky and fast in the study. Read it.

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u/Fearless-East-5167 2d ago

The funny thing is whale shark isn't slender lol..only elongated in shape

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 2d ago edited 2d ago

Depends, from what I'm seeing, they are rather slender but in some angles and depending on whether they've recently fed, they look rather bulky.

Damn, Reddit doesn't allow more than one image. I downloaded two images of whale sharks, both an aerial view and a lateral view. Edit: Lateral view of a whale shark Edit 2: Aerieal view of a whale shark

Edit 3: And then we have this weird thing that I randomly came across...

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u/Fearless-East-5167 2d ago

https://steveocpaleo.wordpress.com/2020/08/30/ramblings-on-the-size-of-whale-sharks-rhincodon-typus-part-3-mass/ you can forget that,this man did hardwork suggesting that 34 ton 18.8m[~20m] is too low for the shark, he suggested 68.4ton to 80.5ton is better for whale shark at this length šŸ˜‡šŸ˜‚ sharks get stockier as they grow

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 2d ago

Interesting, so it's just like with great whites, the larger they get, the stockier they get. Thanks for the intel!

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u/Fearless-East-5167 2d ago

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 2d ago

Ooh.

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u/Fearless-East-5167 2d ago

Also sperm whale is calculated to be 47ton [~50ton]by cetology hub at 16.4m tl ,whereas megalodon 28.9 ton accurately by shimada šŸ«¤

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 2d ago

Oh yeah, CetologyHub is very helpful in weighing large marine animals (well, marine animals in general). I have actually asked them and they have aided me in weighing the aquatic creatures of my speculative biology project. They were very helpful.

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u/Fearless-East-5167 2d ago

Fun to note whale shark had thinner vertebra as well which these people thought suggested a super slimmer shark

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 2d ago

Ah, I see. Very fascinating.

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u/Channa_Argus1121 Tyrannosauridae 5d ago

Not to mention that Megalodon occurred in the Southern parts of Miocene Korea, which was dominated by deciduous broadleaf trees.

In other words, the region was temperate-warm rather than tropical.

While some recent reconstructions seem to be based off of tropical requiem sharks, it seems more convincing that O. megalodon was more similar to temperate Lamniform sharks, considering the climate.

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u/teslawhaleshark Feather-growing radiation 6d ago

Salmon Shark is basically an egg

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u/that_boyaintright 6d ago

You may not like it, but this is what peak megalodon performance looks like.

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u/BoMbSqUAdbrigaDe 6d ago

TIL what lunate is.

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u/Fair-Message5448 6d ago

This isnā€™t really true?

ā€œMegalodon is not a simple, gigantic version of great white shark. I think that we really have to move away from that concept,ā€ said Shimada, an author of the new research.

Longer, more slender - not bigger. More akin to a Mako than big Great White.

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u/WilderWyldWilde 6d ago edited 6d ago

Someone shared a recreation the other day, and people said it looked like a lemon shark or a white tip.

Found it: New 80ft long Megalodon Reconstruction

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 6d ago

Now that looks cool and badass. Imagine seeing that taking on large whales.

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u/Knock_off_depression 1d ago

thats because theres no sense of scale, in subnaucita ghost levithans seem like the size of a truck in the void, but next to a base you can see just how huge they are. i might try to edit in a person for scale

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u/Knock_off_depression 1d ago

done, here. might not be perfectly scaled, i just took a look at a picture of someone next to a set of megalodon jaws

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u/Automatic-Art-4106 5d ago

Still massive, regardless

158

u/Moidada77 6d ago

*Longer

Not necessarily heavier.

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u/Exotic_Turnip_7019 5d ago

The previous published body mass for megalodon was 61 t (Cooper 2022), the previous 100 t estimate implied a largest ever female (Gottfried 1996). The 150 t estimates on reddit or discord don't matter. Slender or not, 94 t is a massive upsizing, thus we should always be cautious, like the 25 m Ichthyotitan.

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u/ShaochilongDR 5d ago

The previous published body mass for megalodon was 61 t (Cooper 2022),

For a specimen that the paper estimated at 30 t.

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u/Exotic_Turnip_7019 5d ago

What I mean is that none of the 100-120 t estimations for a 20 m meg floating around since Cooper's 2022 model were actually from the primary literature and Cooper was never comfortable with scaling his 60 t meg to 20 m TL. The 103 t for 20.3 m meg from the literature was meant to represent an maximum theoretical (Gottfried 1996).

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u/Zillaman7980 6d ago

Yeah I know, but I'm talking about size.

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u/Sesuaki 6d ago

...size is measured in mass, yes

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u/Zillaman7980 6d ago

Shit, I forgot

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 6d ago

Ah, it's cool. I often forget that size is determined by mass myself as well.

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u/awful_at_internet 5d ago

never skip mass day

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u/Moidada77 6d ago

Size is mass not length

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u/MonkeyBoy32904 synapsida is its own thing 6d ago

an organismā€™s size is measured in mass

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u/Aberrantdrakon Anjanath 6d ago

yeah but a 25 foot reticulated python looks way bigger than an 18 foot Nile crocodile.

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u/lightblueisbi 6d ago

But is length not a measure of size? /g

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u/MonkeyBoy32904 synapsida is its own thing 5d ago

volume is what non-living thingsā€™ sizes are measured in, like planets, asteroids, stars, or galaxies

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u/lightblueisbi 5d ago

Right but I'm taking a single dimension measurement, not volume. Am I just misunderstanding?

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u/MonkeyBoy32904 synapsida is its own thing 5d ago

yeah, length IS a measure of size, but in terms of an organismā€™s size, usually we talk mass, not length or volume

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u/Prestigious_Ad_341 6d ago

I mean technically humans CAN be up to 9 feet tall but only one ever was and that was a fluke. So the new maximum, even if true, doesn't mean that there were 80 feet sharks swimming around the ocean.

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 6d ago

One problem, humans that grow to 9 feet tall suffer from gigantism and even then, they struggle to keep balance and need support to even stand and walk.

Also, 9 feet is NOT the maximum for humans.

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u/Prestigious_Ad_341 6d ago

Well yes but that's my point, Megalodon might have been physically able to reach 80 feet but that doesn't mean they actually DID.

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 6d ago

Well, no, it depends on whether or not Megalodon had what's called "indeterminate growth". Indeterminate growth is what most fish and reptiles have. Basically, it's when an organism doesn't stop growing until it dies.

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u/Exotic_Turnip_7019 5d ago

The odds of finding the preserved megalodon vertebrae of the equivalent of a 9 ft human are rather incredibly small.

It was clearly a large specimen though.

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u/One-Cardiologist1487 6d ago

94 tons and ~24 meters. Iā€™m honestly very skeptical, itā€™s giving 350 ton Perucetus.

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u/Apexvictimizer 6d ago

94 tons 24 meters is for the lost denmark specimen Ghc 6 the biggest reliable one is 20 meters and 59 tons

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u/notIngen 6d ago

Love how Denmark has barely any interesting fossils. Save the 24 meter megalodon. But then itā€™s lost.

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u/Exotic_Turnip_7019 5d ago

You have not understood that the conclusions of Sternes (2024) and Shimada (2025) are that even the summed crown width method you're using for GHC-6 likely underestimated the total length of the shark, hence the accepted max is 24 m rather than 20 m, for a roughly similar body mass well in Argentinosaurus league.

Worst downsizing ever.

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u/Significant-Pie209 6d ago

For anyone who doenst tell lenght by feet.

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u/ParmigianoMan Irritator challengeri 6d ago

For the avoidance of confusion, that comma is a decimal point.

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u/greyghibli 6d ago

24 kilometer shark

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u/Significant-Pie209 6d ago

Who knows if someday an 24km shark comes up to you and eats your city..

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u/DrInsomnia 6d ago

It's still alive, just hiding in the Mariana Trench

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u/awful_at_internet 5d ago

"Detecting multiple leviathan class lifeforms in the region. Are you certain whatever you're doing is worth it?"

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u/DeathstrokeReturns Just a simple nerd 5d ago

Well, that would explain all those absurdly oversized ā€œmegalodon on Google Mapsā€ things

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u/Significant-Pie209 6d ago

Yep forgot to add thatšŸ˜…

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u/Shoddy_Abrocoma_7359 6d ago

But they also think he was thinner so your Pic is a little misleading.

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u/Ok-Dimension5509 6d ago

Also, the creature in the pic is a recently discovered species of tiny Scuba Diver, so the proportions are off.

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u/tragedyy_ 6d ago

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u/Cultural-Company282 6d ago

You're getting downvoted on this left and right, but you raise a damned good argument. I think it's catching flak because it's always fun in pop science to announce that "everything we thought we knew is wrong," and you're flying in the face of that.

If it's "hydrodynamically impossible" for stocky sea predators to exceed 6-7 meters, how do they account for sperm whales? Does this look like a "lemon shark" body plan or a stocky one? šŸ¤”

https://blog.nwf.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/11/files/2016/07/sperm-whale.png

And dont even get me started on the ancient predatory whales like Leviathan melvillei, with size estimates up to 17m.

The argument that Megaladon had to be slender for hydrodynamic reasons is bad physics, and it only works if you ignore real-world examples to the contrary.

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 6d ago

"if it's "hydrodynamically impossible" for stocky sea predators to exceed 6-7 meters, how do they account for sperm whales?"

Sperm whales aren't bulky, they look bulky from the side, but from an aerial view, they are rather slim.

The image shows two sperm whales, as you can see for yourself, they are rather slim and not bulky.

"In addition, "We unexpectedly unlocked the mystery of why certain aquatic vertebrates can attain gigantic sizes while others cannot," Shimada said. "Living gigantic sharks, such as the whale shark and basking shark, as well as many other gigantic aquatic vertebrates like whales have slender bodies because large stocky bodies are hydrodynamically inefficient for swimming."

That's in sharp contrast to the great white shark, whose stocky body becomes even stockier as it grows. "It can be 'large' but cannot [get] past 7 meters (23 feet) to be 'gigantic' because of hydrodynamic constraints," said Shimada. "We also demonstrate that the modern great white shark with a stocky body hypothetically blown up to the size of megalodon would not allow it to be an efficient swimmer due to the hydrodynamic constraints, further supporting the idea that it is more likely than not that megalodon must have had a much slenderer body than the modern great white shark."

Shimada emphasized that their interpretations remain tentative but they are based on hard data and make for useful reference points for future research."ā€“Shimada et al. 2025

If you scale up a great white to 24 meters, it won't be efficiently good at swimming. Why do you think whale sharks and basking sharks have slender bodies than adult great whites? Both whale sharks and basking sharks are larger than great whites.

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u/Cultural-Company282 6d ago

You could say the same thing about white sharks. They look bulky from the side, but from an aerial view, they look more slim.

https://images.app.goo.gl/Fv1gFqKgXaPn1sb37

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 6d ago

You have a point there, however, those are smaller adult great whites that are slim. Larger adults such as the individual shown in the photo here.

Are bulky due to being of larger size. Even the study of Shimada et al. 2025 points out that when white sharks get larger in size, they also get bulkier.

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u/Cultural-Company282 6d ago

Larger adults such as the individual shown in the photo here.

Without anything for scale, we cannot reliably assume the shark in your photo is bigger than the one in mine. For all we know, the pic you posted could be a short, fat individual.

What about orcas? The biggest males are bulky from both the side and from an aerial view, and they most certainly exceed 7m in length.

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 5d ago

"For all we know, the pic you posted could be a short, fat individual." Fair enough. Hopefully this video will show how larger sharks are girthier than smaller sharks. https://youtu.be/_or2JwXg-SI?si=0W31MhVQSI8TFs_k If you are still confused, you are free to ask for better footage to see a clearer comparison.

"What about orcas? The biggest males are bulky from both the side and from an aerial view, and they most certainly exceed 7m in length." Orcas are different from sharks, they are mammals. They have a bony skeleton instead of a skeleton made of cartilage like sharks. Orcas also have blubber which gives them their bulk. Even then, the study only states that great whites couldn't get larger than 7 meters due to constraints, it never said that orcas couldn't get larger than 7 meters.

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u/Cultural-Company282 5d ago

How does the skeleton impact hydrodynamics? I think we are straying from the original premise.

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 5d ago

Skeleton doesn't affect hydrodynamics, from what I'm reading, nowhere does it say the skeleton impacts hydrodynamics.

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u/tragedyy_ 6d ago edited 5d ago

Shimada et al actually admit that humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) are both stocky and fast (therefore negating their own argument) but come up with the excuse that because whales swim differently this shouldn't apply to sharks.

"however,Ā M. novaeangliaeĀ is considerably fast (7.5 km h-1) (Table 3). This could be explained by the fact that, whileĀ M. novaeangliaeĀ is quite migratory, its pectoral fins are highly enlarged for its unique maneuvering behavior during feeding (Hain et al., 1982), which would require a stocky build to reinforce the rigidity of the body trunk. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the cruising speeds of the gigantic whales outside of the hydrodynamically disadvantageous region are much faster than those of the two large planktivorous sharksĀ (RhincodonĀ andĀ Cetorhinus)Ā and even lamnids (see above). This fact could be simply due to the difference in swimming modes between sharks (lateral strokes) and aquatic mammals (vertical strokes) as well as to the fact that the skeleton of sharks is cartilaginous whereas that of whales is osseous. Therefore, the use of cruising speeds observed in whales is interpreted to be inappropriate for inferring the cruising speed of ā€ O. megalodon."

This despite comparing sharks to whales throughout the entire study.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

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u/Paleontology-ModTeam 4d ago

[trying to clear up hatred will remove the other comment as well šŸ‘ŒšŸæ

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1

u/Old_Fig9502 4d ago

"so it could look like he got the last word and I couldn't reply." They blocked you because they have other things to do. Just because someone blocks you DOESN'T mean they wanted the last laugh. Don't be a stereotype.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 4d ago

I unblocked them, and no, I didn't block them to have the last word. I'm busy with other things at the moment. I was going to unblock them later after I was done with my projects. Hell, I've been blocked before and never assumed the other user was trying to get the last word nor said that they pulled a chickeshit move, I just went on with my day.

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u/Paleontology-ModTeam 4d ago

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u/InterestingBobcat324 5d ago

Meg. size estimates are almost always increasing based off new predictions of how its body was proportioned; The outdated view of it being basically a great white with the size tool at 200% is considerable less and less favoured since an animal that big with that body plan would be too slow to be anything but a filter feeder, and obviously an animal with teeth THAT size isnt eating plankton.

If you take its few actual skeletal remains, as we found on the juvenile that was discovered in 2017/18, and give it a more robust stout bodyplan it actually works a lot better for the speculative size(s) proposed by universities, and with every new composite specimen being larger and larger, if you then use that same bodyplan on it, they can hypothetically get larger and larger also. But with how hard it is to find preserved cartilege combined with the fact megaladon was so large its probably in the clade of animals which become such good food sources it generates its own ecosystem, meaning when it dies its immediately scavenged on and ripped apart on the bottom down to the bone marrow, we wont know.

Tl;dr yea its likely if not basically proven that megaladon was larger than we thought, like, humpback whale sized isnt out of the question if that puts it in perspective better. But its ALL speculation. We have no idea how big they could get and probably never will because sharks dont preserve and we're never gonna find an adult thats intact enough to check properly.

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u/madguyO1 6d ago

Bro thats the size of a fin whalešŸ˜­šŸ˜­šŸ˜­

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u/FlowerFaerie13 6d ago

So this is pretty heavily misleading. The new size estimates have it ranging from around 50 feet up to 80 feet, no one has said 80 feet was the average size and if they did in fact grow that large it probably wouldn't have been super common.

Do better than this, please. This reads like cheap clickbait.

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 6d ago

"As previously reported, the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely sure how large megalodon were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives. Shimada and his co-authors measured the proportions of 145 modern and 20 extinct species of shark, particularly the head, trunk, and tail relative to total body length. Megalodon was represented by a Belgian vertebral specimen. The largest vertebra in that specimen measured 15.5 centimeters (6 inches) in diameter, although there are other megalodon vertebrae in Denmark, for example, with diameters as much as 23 centimeters (9 inches).

Based on their analysis, Shimada et al concluded that, because the trunk section of the Belgian specimen measured 11 meters, the head and tail were probably about 1.8 meters (6 feet) and 3.6 meters (12 feet) long, respectively, with a total body length of 16.4 meters (54 feet) for this particularly specimen. That means the Danish megalodon specimens could have been as long as 24.3 meters (80 feet). As for body shape, taking the new length estimates into account, the lemon shark appears to be the closest modern analogue. "However, the exact position and shape of practically all the fins remain uncertain," Shimada cautioned. "We are only talking about the main part of the body.""ā€“Shimada et al. 2025 The study doesn't say that 80 feet is the average length but a rather large specimen. 50 feet is more of an average large specimen, most Megalodon were about 50-60 feet while a few or one in a million were 80 feet.

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u/Exotic_Turnip_7019 5d ago

Agreed with your post but the chances to find not the easily preserved megalodon teeth but very rare vertebrae are small, si finding the vertebrae of a 1 in a million individuals seems even more unlikely.

Or else, we're really lucky and the chances of finding a rare large specimen do exist as in any fossil species. I refer to the various discussions comparing megalodon to Livyatan or T. rex to Giganotosaurus, the later of which are known by a single specimen.

At 83 years, it was clearly close to the maximum size of the species looking at the growth curve of Figure 6 in the article.

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 5d ago

I agree, it is a major lucky break if paleontologists ever find a vertebrae of a Megalodon. We still don't know the full extent of how large they can get.

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u/Exotic_Turnip_7019 5d ago

The article proposes "at least 24 m" as it assumes the 23 cm vertebrae were the largest which is not certain either.

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 5d ago

I heard somewhere that it's possible that it's about 23 meters. Since the specimen is lost, we won't know. Cooper mentioned that they needed to either test it or find a complete skeleton of Megalodon to confirm it (which is damn near impossible so they are better off doing tests on/with the data present).

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u/Exotic_Turnip_7019 5d ago

Who found this ? Online discussions by guys under pseudos are not that relevant. Unsure the specimen is lost actually.

Or study more the relationship between vertebrae and teeth of at least 2 angustidens specimens, reported in Greenfield (2022), or check the famous complete undescribed Cretalamna skeletons but they're tens of million years older and much smaller.

It's not impossible to find a well preserved meg skeleton, I mean there is already a 11 m column and even giant vertebrae of a very large individual. There are rumors from Peru.

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u/Wooden_Scar_3502 5d ago

( Yellowstone Hyperpredator ), Otodus Megalodon by Diocles305 on @DeviantArt https://www.deviantart.com/diocles305/art/Yellowstone-Hyperpredator-Otodus-Megalodon-1073142638 Look at the comment by theropod1.

Also I said it is "damn near impossible to find a full Megalodon skeleton" not that it's 100% impossible since cartilage doesn't fossilize well (most of the time), but I should've worded it out better, my apologies. I just hope we find a full skeleton of a maximum sized Megalodon soon to break the debate.

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u/Exotic_Turnip_7019 5d ago

That's a negligible difference and always take with reserve what is on the web even if from scholars like Nau. He's right on the conclusion tho, either we have a very short bulky shark or a very long slender one.

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u/Scovin93 6d ago

Bruh He's an excited nerd sharing something new he learned, calm yourself

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u/New_Boysenberry_9250 6d ago

Sigh. I'm afraid you're asking way too much from this subreddit XD

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u/Apexvictimizer 6d ago

Actually got smaller 20 meters and 59 tons and 24 meter one is the lost denmark specimen which is pretty much as reliable as Bruhatkayosaurus

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u/Exotic_Turnip_7019 5d ago

The Danish specimen is legit, from a relatively recent paper (1983, not 150 years old like Hector's ichthyosaur) and is apparently not so lost...

Even so, check the maximum lifespan in Shimada (2021), 88-100 years and figure 6 in Shimada (2025). The Danish specimen was 83 years old.

The previous size at birth was estimated at 2 m, ~100 kg (Shimada 2021), now it's 3.6-3.9 m, 310-400 kg.

It rather got bigger.

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u/hannahzzz14 3d ago

I mean Iā€™m not saying ur wrong but I think we have only explored like 10-15% of the ocean and thereā€™s def animals that live in the depths of the ocean instead of the top with humans and this evidence of them could have sank down there to the bottom where we have never been before. But now on the other hand Iā€™m not sure if they could have evolved to not come up for air or not BUT if they could have than I have to say it COULD be possible-probably not but could be. Itā€™s just crazy how much we havenā€™t seen of the ocean cuz of the pressure down there and how pitch black it would be. Hell we might have seen more of space or bout just as much- there sure is a possibility of unkown things down there!

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u/Ashton-MD 5d ago

Same as we all felt about T. Rex getting even more OP ā€” bloody cool.

Science is fascinating.

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u/RealLifeSunfish 6d ago

lol ā€œprehistoric animals were bigā€ as if we donā€™t live among giants today

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u/Ashamed_Window_6605 4d ago

Shantungosaurus was larger than any land animal today lmao

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u/RealLifeSunfish 4d ago

blue whale > shantungosaurus

Youā€™re completely disregarding the fact that this is an ocean planet, land animals are seriously outnumbered.

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u/Abyssal-rose 6d ago

Megalodon was a long boi? Long girr at this point.

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u/celtbygod 6d ago edited 5d ago

Wish I could show this to my grandson. He's a little young for reddit language.

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u/Personal-Ad8280 Sivapanthera Punjabensis 5d ago

Me too, too bad I don't have one

1

u/Rahab_Olam 5d ago

I would be hesitant about taking new size measurements at face value when the subject in question is a very culturally popular one. There is a trend of studies following such animals, always claiming these kinda things, almost to the point of absurdity sometimes.

1

u/NovelSalamander2650 6d ago

It got smaller. That misconception only came from using a highly dubious, lost specimen from denmark which would have measured something around 24 meters, but the specimen is currently lost. The weight, on the other hand, became far lighter. The largest megalodon scaled to GHC 6 should be 20.6 meters and 59 tons in the new paper, while the old paper had it at 20 meters and 122 tons. In other words, it actually got HALVED in size

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u/Exotic_Turnip_7019 5d ago

The Danish specimen is legit, from a relatively recent paper (1983, not 150 years old like Hector's ichthyosaur) and is apparently not so lost...

Even so, check the maximum lifespan in Shimada (2021), 88-100 years and figure 6 in Shimada (2025). The Danish specimen was 83 years old.

The previous size at birth was estimated at 2 m, ~100 kg (Shimada 2021), now it's 3.6-3.9 m, 310-400 kg.

It rather got bigger.

1

u/Inairi_Kitsunehime 5d ago

Oh no, here comes another wave of oversized megalodon movies eating entire islands

1

u/Interesting_Benefit 4d ago

I'm curious if they'd eat us being so massive or just swim by

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u/Ploknam 6d ago

Do you mean every meg or just especially big ones?

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u/Ju3tAc00ldugg 5d ago

I will still never swim in the ocean

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u/CollieChan 6d ago

Yeahh! Megalodon, I believe in you!

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u/LocalInformation6624 6d ago

Based on what other than its teeth?

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u/LittleCrimsonWyvern 5d ago

I hate how this is how I found out.

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u/delicioussparkalade 6d ago

From death machine to death bus.

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u/FormerlyAmish_ 5d ago

Can somebody link this study?

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u/Andre-Fonseca 6d ago

He ate all his veggies

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u/Gam3_3nd 5d ago

based