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Description
A drawing of Carcharocles (possibly Carcharodon, depending on your taxonomic standpoint) megalodon, the largest shark known to have existed. The fossil record for megalodon begins about 16 million years ago in the Miocene and extinction seems to have been about 1.6 MYA in the lower Pleistocene. Unlike the largest sharks today, basking and whale sharks, this was not a serene filter feeder but a macro predator thought to have preyed mostly on cetaceans, based on gashes left by megalodon teeth on their bones. We're talking large baleen whales such as cetotherids (an extinct group) bowheads, and rorquals, and sperm whales and fossil relatives. That's insane. Then you've got smaller cetaceans including dolphins and porpoises, plus sirenians, pinnipeds and sea turtles. If you ask me, possibly the most imposing predator in our planet's history. Fossil evidence is purported to show that juveniles preferred areas where small cetaceans were abundant while adults favoured areas where large whales were abundant.

Megalodon's closest living relatives are universally agreed (as far as I know) to be lamnids - the great white, Isurus and Lamna species - though its exact phylogenetic position is unresolved and some consider it congeneric with the great white. I favour the opposite school of thought promoting a new genus name (Carcharocles) hence the name chosen for this picture.

Megalodon is known mainly from thousands of fossilised teeth (shark skeletons being cartilage, teeth is normally all you get). These are broad, thick, roughly triangular and finely serrated, and range up to about the size of a human hand. Estimating size based almost exclusively on teeth is obviously not an exact science, and modern estimates range from about 13 - 20 metres for the total length of adult megalodon. For the scale in this picture I went with Michael Gottfried et. al's. frequently quoted maximum of 15.9 m; quite conservative by the standards of recent estimates. Gottfried and his coworkers estimated the weight at about 48 tonnes, and I was pleased to find after finishing the drawing that 50 tonnes or so seems reasonable, at least to my eyes, for this very speculative reconstruction. The man is 1.8 m, or 5' 11" for the imperially minded. The shark represents an adult female.

I made a conscious effort to avoid the scaled - up great white syndrome that so often afflicts megalodon pictures, and tried to draw proportions supported by academic theory and speculation. The chondrocranium and jaws of megalodon have been reconstructed as proportionally robust and blocky when compared with great whites, and I made an effort to incorporate this. The snout is proportionally shorter and blunter than that of a great white and the eye smaller. I originally considered making the gill slits longer but decided against it, partly for aesthetic reasons. They seem big enough, I reckon. The body is extremely robust, with a massive girth. The pectoral fins are scaled up to provide lift for all that extra weight, based on speculation by Gottfried et. al., who also suggested that the fins would be thicker than expected from simply scaling up a great white. Sounds good to me. I also made the caudal fin huge to provide thrust for a gargantuan shark, and gave her a very thick tail stock with massive lateral keels imagining the power used to drive such a beast forward.

Description
A drawing of Carcharocles (possibly Carcharodon, depending on your taxonomic standpoint) megalodon, the largest shark known to have existed. The fossil record for megalodon begins about 16 million years ago in the Miocene and extinction seems to have been about 1.6 MYA in the lower Pleistocene. Unlike the largest sharks today, basking and whale sharks, this was not a serene filter feeder but a macro predator thought to have preyed mostly on cetaceans, based on gashes left by megalodon teeth on their bones. We're talking large baleen whales such as cetotherids (an extinct group) bowheads, and rorquals, and sperm whales and fossil relatives. That's insane. Then you've got smaller cetaceans including dolphins and porpoises, plus sirenians, pinnipeds and sea turtles. If you ask me, possibly the most imposing predator in our planet's history. Fossil evidence is purported to show that juveniles preferred areas where small cetaceans were abundant while adults favoured areas where large whales were abundant.

Megalodon's closest living relatives are universally agreed (as far as I know) to be lamnids - the great white, Isurus and Lamna species - though its exact phylogenetic position is unresolved and some consider it congeneric with the great white. I favour the opposite school of thought promoting a new genus name (Carcharocles) hence the name chosen for this picture.

Megalodon is known mainly from thousands of fossilised teeth (shark skeletons being cartilage, teeth is normally all you get). These are broad, thick, roughly triangular and finely serrated, and range up to about the size of a human hand. Estimating size based almost exclusively on teeth is obviously not an exact science, and modern estimates range from about 13 - 20 metres for the total length of adult megalodon. For the scale in this picture I went with Michael Gottfried et. al's. frequently quoted maximum of 15.9 m; quite conservative by the standards of recent estimates. Gottfried and his coworkers estimated the weight at about 48 tonnes, and I was pleased to find after finishing the drawing that 50 tonnes or so seems reasonable, at least to my eyes, for this very speculative reconstruction. The man is 1.8 m, or 5' 11" for the imperially minded. The shark represents an adult female.

I made a conscious effort to avoid the scaled - up great white syndrome that so often afflicts megalodon pictures, and tried to draw proportions supported by academic theory and speculation. The chondrocranium and jaws of megalodon have been reconstructed as proportionally robust and blocky when compared with great whites, and I made an effort to incorporate this. The snout is proportionally shorter and blunter than that of a great white and the eye smaller. I originally considered making the gill slits longer but decided against it, partly for aesthetic reasons. They seem big enough, I reckon. The body is extremely robust, with a massive girth. The pectoral fins are scaled up to provide lift for all that extra weight, based on speculation by Gottfried et. al., who also suggested that the fins would be thicker than expected from simply scaling up a great white. Sounds good to me. I also made the caudal fin huge to provide thrust for a gargantuan shark, and gave her a very thick tail stock with massive lateral keels imagining the power used to drive such a beast forward.