In early 2014, five commercial fishermen working off the coast of Western Australia reported an encounter with a large unidentified animal. The crew was operating roughly 70 nautical miles from Steep Point, the westernmost tip of mainland Australia, in waters ranging from 300 to over 2,000 meters deep. Conditions were calm and visibility was good.
The crew estimated the object at between 90 and 120 feet in length, with an average estimate of 115 feet. Their vessel, a 60-foot boat, appeared small alongside it. The object moved alongside the vessel at roughly eight knots, holding at a depth they estimated between 15 and 30 feet. They observed it for several minutes before it descended into water over a kilometer deep.
The captain, who had worked these waters commercially for over 20 years, initially thought it might be a submarine, which gives some indication of the scale he was processing. One of the older crew members did not speak about the encounter for three days.
The crew’s report was dismissed by authorities within 48 hours. A statement suggested the sighting was likely a misidentification of a whale shark or large whale under unusual light conditions. Some crew members later said they received informal, discouraging contact from people connected to government fisheries management.
The men were experienced commercial fishermen. People who knew the captain described him as measured and not prone to exaggeration. There was some disagreement among the crew about what they had seen, which the researcher who interviewed them noted as unusual.
The crew’s account fits a pattern of similar reports from Pacific and Indian Ocean waters over several decades. In 1987, a research vessel logged an anomalous sonar return southwest of the Australian coast. In the late 1990s, a fishing operation off New Zealand recovered a section of line that had been bitten through by something the crew could not identify. In 2014, a charter operator off Port Lincoln in South Australia recorded a large unidentified object on fish-finding equipment that tracked his vessel for about 40 minutes.
The waters off Western Australia have some notable features. The continental shelf drops into deep water with unusual abruptness. The Leeuwin Current maintains water temperatures that are warmer than comparable latitudes elsewhere. The region supports some of the highest concentrations of large whale species found anywhere in the modern ocean.
The scientific consensus places the extinction of Megalodon at approximately 3.6 million years ago. This is based primarily on the tooth record, which shows a widespread absence of Megalodon teeth in sediment samples from that point forward. The proposed extinction mechanism involves tectonic shifts that altered ocean circulation, contracted warm shallow seas, and moved large whale populations toward colder polar waters that Megalodon, as a warm-water specialist, may not have been able to follow.
There are some gaps in this model. Deep-ocean sediment sampling is partial at best. Some Megalodon teeth have been recovered with thin manganese encrustation, suggesting a more recent date than the standard timeline would predict, though this evidence has been challenged on methodological grounds. Megalodon teeth found at depth suggest the species may have had access to deeper water than the extinction model typically assumes.
Megalodon was not a giant great white shark. It belongs to the family Otodontidae, a lineage that diverged from the great white shark’s ancestors tens of millions of years ago. The physical similarities are the result of convergent evolution. Megalodon teeth and vertebrae suggest the largest individuals reached 60 to 80 feet or more, though no complete skeleton has ever been recovered.
Megalodon was the apex predator of its marine environment for approximately 13 million years. Its prey included whales, and fossilized whale bones bearing Megalodon bite marks have been found across multiple ocean basins.
We have explored less than 20 percent of Earth’s oceans, and the deep ocean below 200 meters remains largely unexamined. We have more detailed maps of the surface of Mars than of our own ocean floor. Large animals have been discovered in these waters in recent decades, including the giant squid, which was considered a sailor’s myth until photographic evidence was obtained in 2004; the megamouth shark, entirely unknown to science until 1976; and the coelacanth, which was considered extinct for 65 million years until one was identified in a fisherman’s catch in 1938.
The Australian crew’s account was reported to the maritime authority, and the captain later declined to discuss it further with journalists. He said he had said what needed to be said. The crew returned to work in the same waters.
We cannot say with certainty what the crew saw. It may have been a whale in deceptive light that created an illusion of scale. It may have been a real animal that remains unidentified. The scientific consensus that Megalodon is extinct is based on substantive evidence and remains the accepted position. But the deep ocean has a documented history of concealing things that should not exist right up until the moment it stops concealing them.
