Why surfing was a bad idea in the Pliocene

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Why surfing was a bad idea in the Pliocene

By Linda | April 3, 2008

Great white sharks can get very big. The largest on record was caught off the coast of Cuba in 1945. It was a female measuring 21 feet and weighing a whopping 7300 pounds! In comparison, the mythical white shark from the movie Jaws, was a 25 footer. There are anecdotal accounts of great whites as large as 31 feet, although there is no photographic or other physical evidence to substantiate these sightings.

As awesomely terrifying as a 25 foot great white may seem, scientists believe that the oceans of between 2 and 20 million years ago were inhabited by a much bigger ancestor, Carcharodon Megalodon.

An interesting fact is that the length of a great white’s tooth has a measurable correlation to the size of the specimen it came from. The chart above illustrates that (measured from the root to the tip) a 3 inch long white shark tooth (marked as specimen A) would belong to an animal approximately 25 feet in length.

Because shark skeletons are made from cartilage and not bone, there are no existing skeletons of prehistoric sharks. We do however have fossil teeth. Since megalodon and great white teeth are so similar, scientists hypothesize that they shared many other similar physical characteristics as well.

The largest fossil megalodon tooth found so far measures 7 5/8 inches in length. Using what we know about white sharks, paleontologists hypothesize that megalodons grew to a length of between 45 and 60 feet and weighed up to 65 tons!

During the Pliocene Epoch (4 million years ago), the last of the great ice ages began. As the oceans cooled, megalodon moved south to warmer waters while the warm blooded whales and porpoises that were its main food source adapted to the colder ocean regions. Some scientists postulate that this animal had to eat 1.25 tons each day. It’s believed that the megalodon could not sustain its massive bulk on the smaller, faster schools of fish in its new habitat and thus became extinct.