{"id":263337,"date":"2025-05-30T03:15:20","date_gmt":"2025-05-30T03:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/aerospace\/the-fearsome-megalodon-ate-basically-whatever-it-wanted-to-reach-its-daily-100000-calorie-need-study-suggests\/"},"modified":"2025-05-30T03:15:20","modified_gmt":"2025-05-30T03:15:20","slug":"the-fearsome-megalodon-ate-basically-whatever-it-wanted-to-reach-its-daily-100000-calorie-need-study-suggests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=263337","title":{"rendered":"The Fearsome Megalodon Ate Basically Whatever It Wanted to Reach Its Daily 100,000-Calorie Need, Study Suggests"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Scientists previously assumed the giant, prehistoric sharks mostly feasted on whales, but it turns out they probably weren\u2019t so picky<\/h2>\n
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Margherita Bassi<\/a><\/p>\n

– Daily Correspondent<\/span><\/p>\n

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An artistic reconstruction of the extinct megalodon. Scientists’ ideas about how the megalodon looked are based on its fossilized teeth.
\n Hugo Sal\u00e1is via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 4.0<\/a><\/span>
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Between 3 million and 20 million years ago, the largest predatory fish<\/a> ever known hunted in Earth\u2019s oceans. Called the <\/em>megalodon <\/em>(Otodus megalodon<\/em>), this giant shark<\/a> grew up to 79 feet long, had teeth the size of human hands and could bite with the strength of an industrial hydraulic press.<\/p>\n

But what scientists know about the extinct creature has been almost entirely determined from fossil teeth<\/a>\u2014since paleontologists have yet to discover<\/a> a complete megalodon, and the animals\u2019 cartilaginous skeletons don\u2019t preserve well. Now, new research on the mineral content of their teeth suggests megalodons ate pretty much whatever they wanted.<\/p>\n

Until recently, scientists assumed that megalodons satisfied their estimated 100,000-calorie daily needs<\/a> by mostly eating whales. A study published Monday in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters<\/a><\/em>, however, suggests the prehistoric shark had a much more diverse diet than previously thought\u2014akin to the great white shark\u2019s \u201cif it moves, it\u2019s food\u201d hunting strategy of today, writes Vice<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Ashley Fike.<\/p>\n

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Jeremy McCormack with a fossilized megalodon tooth.<\/p>\n

Uwe Dettmar for Goethe University<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An international team of researchers reached this conclusion after analyzing the ratio of different variants, called isotopes, of the mineral zinc in 18-million-year-old megalodon teeth. Animals absorb zinc only through food, so this could offer a hint to their diets. Muscles and organs absorb more of the isotope zinc-64 than zinc-66, meaning that the higher up the food chain an animal is\u2014or the more meat and fish it eats\u2014the less zinc-66 it absorbs, and its ratio of zinc-66 to zinc-64 is lower, in turn.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince we don\u2019t know how the ratio of the two zinc isotopes at the bottom of the food pyramid was at that time, we compared the teeth of various prehistoric and extant shark species with each other and with other animal species. This enabled us to gain an impression of predator-prey relationships 18 million years ago,\u201d Jeremy McCormack<\/a>, a scientist from Goethe University Frankfurt and lead author of the study, says in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, the isotope ratios in the teeth put the megalodon at the top of the food chain, alongside close shark relatives such as Otodus chubutensis<\/em>. At the same time, however, the scientists noticed there wasn\u2019t a huge difference between the megalodon and the lower-tiered animals, suggesting the sharks feasted on creatures from all rungs of the ladder.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were not concentrating on certain prey types, but they must have fed throughout the food web, on many different species,\u201d McCormack tells CNN<\/a>\u2019s Jacopo Prisco. \u201cWhile certainly this was a fierce apex predator, and no one else would probably prey on an adult megalodon, it\u2019s clear that they themselves could potentially feed on almost everything else that swam around.\u201d<\/p>\n

The results also indicate that megalodon populations living in different habitats had slightly contrasting diets, potentially because of differing prey availability.<\/p>\n

More broadly, the study invites comparisons between the megalodon and its iconic extant relative, the great white shark<\/a>. These comparisons, however, may have previously led to some overreaching assumptions.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrevious studies simply assumed that megalodon must have looked like a gigantic version of the modern great white shark<\/a> without any evidence,\u201d Kenshu Shimada<\/a>, a vertebrate paleontologist at DePaul University and co-author of the new study, told National Geographic<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Jason Bittel back in March. He and colleagues had just published a different paper<\/a> that reassessed the prehistoric shark\u2019s size<\/a>, suggesting that it had a more slender body than its smaller, modern cousin.<\/p>\n

The new study thus joins a host of research challenging widely held ideas about megalodons and their relatives, says Alberto Collareta<\/a>, a paleontologist at the University of Pisa in Italy who was not involved in the research, to CNN. \u201cThese have led us to abandon traditional reconstruction of the megatooth sharks as \u2018inflated\u2019 versions of the modern white shark. We now know that the megalodon was something else\u2014in terms of size, shape and ancestry, and of biology, too,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

In fact, with both species eating generalist diets, great white sharks might have outcompeted megalodons for food and ultimately played a role in their demise<\/a>. \u201cEven \u2018supercarnivores\u2019 are not immune to extinction,\u201d Shimada says in the statement.<\/p>\n

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