Guest Author: James Ormiston
Palaeontology MSci Graduate / PalaeoArtist
We all know the story leading up to the summer of 1993: God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates Steven Spielberg, Spielberg creates dinosaurs, dinosaurs inherit the box office (other creation timelines are available). The titanic impact of Jurassic Park brought a head to the public’s interest in dinosaurs which had been bubbling over for some years.
Guest Author: Dr Rachel Kruft Welton
Current Palaeobiology MSc Student, University of Bristol
The story of spider evolution starts over 400Ma, when their eight-legged, thick-waisted ancestor crawled out onto land. The pre-cursor to spiders were chunky beasts called trigonotarbids. The earliest trigonotarbid fossil comes from Silurian rocks near Ludlow, Shropshire. Trigonotarbids were a successful group of arthropods, whose fossil record stretches from the Silurian, through to the Permian. Unlike spiders, they had a segmented abdomen (opisthosoma), which can be seen in the 3D fossil (Figure 1), and no spinnerets, suggesting that they did not make silk, or at least not strands of it.
Guest Author: Dr Rachel Kruft Welton
Current Palaeobiology MSc Student, University of Bristol
Lagerstätten are fossil deposits containing exceptionally preserved remains of creatures from the past. Often soft parts have been preserved and snap-shots of organisms in life-like positions have been captured. The creation of such a fossil deposit is an enormously rare event, and as such, Lagerstätten have been enthusiastically studied.
Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Graduate / PhD Student, University of Swansea
No.
As much as I would love to have seen and dived with this beast, the science is clear: Megalodon is extinct. Trust me, we would’ve noticed if it wasn’t.
Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Graduate / PhD Student, University of Swansea
And so we come to the end of Megalodon’s supremacy in the Cenozoic oceans. It had a good run for sure (~20 million years), but unfortunately all good things come to an end. While everything about Megalodon is cool and warrants research attention (why do you think I ended up with 7 blog posts?), a key question of its recent science is when the last of these giant sharks finally died, leaving only its teeth as its legacy.
Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Graduate / PhD Student, University of Swansea
This blog will be discussing some particularly clever recent work on Megalodon. And with it comes a new main player in this ball pit of research. Enter Humberto Ferrón, who I was lucky enough to get to work with on my MSc thesis [1]. He made quite a splash in 2017 when he published two papers of immediate relevance to Megalodon that provided an extremely plausible explanation as to how such a massive shark had managed to evolve in the first place.
Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Graduate / PhD Student, University of Swansea
As we’ve seen so far, there have been changes and updates to the scientific consensus of Megalodon’s taxonomic assignment and maximum body size. However, its favourite snack is something that is universally agreed upon in the scientific community. In another rarity, it’s something that’s usually portrayed with pretty good accuracy in fiction. Allow me to introduce a shark that ate whales – actual whales!
Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Graduate / PhD Student, University of Swansea
While a lot of recent work has gone into when Megalodon went extinct (to be discussed in detail in Saturday’s post), there’s less work regarding when exactly this giant shark first appeared. But I can tell you this with certainty: no, Megalodon was not alive when dinosaurs were still roaming the earth.
Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Graduate / PhD Student, University of Swansea
You might be surprised to hear that the scientific consensus on Megalodon’s maximum body size has varied over the last few decades. A lot of this has to do with how we estimate the shark’s total length (TL). This is a hard thing to do considering that palaeontologists mostly have only its fossil teeth to go off of [1]. Like all modern sharks, Megalodon’s skeleton was made out of cartilage, which decomposes with the rest of the body after death and therefore has particularly poor preservation potential in the fossil record. However, calculating TL only takes a tooth and some fairly basic maths.
Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Palaeobiology Graduate / PhD student, University of Swansea
When palaeontologists discuss extinct sharks to the general public, the Megalodon (Otodus megalodon) is pretty much always the first to come to mind. And there’s a good reason why – it’s a giant shark. The name ‘megalodon’ translates to Big Tooth; a name that’s pretty self-explanatory.
