In March 2025, a team of 29 researchers from nine countries published a study that revised the accepted reconstruction of the megalodon, one of the largest predatory sharks ever known. Their work
In March 2025, a team of 29 researchers from nine countries published a study that revised the accepted reconstruction of the megalodon, one of the largest predatory sharks ever known. Their work suggests that the animal was not a larger version of the great white shark, the form long used in museums, films, and textbooks, but a longer, more slender creature whose closest living anatomical match i…
Scientists had always portrayed the megalodon as a giant great white shark, scaled up from teeth that looked the same but were far larger. For over a century, that assumption went virtually unchallenged in museums and movies.
Nearly every image of the megalodon ever produced—in films, museums, and textbooks—has been a reconstruction based on limited evidence, not a direct portrait. Because shark skeletons are made of cartilage, which rots quickly rather than fossilizing, no complete megalodon skeleton has ever been found in over 150 years of searching.What scientists do have are teeth, which are abundant. A single shar…