Shark Week: How Did Megalodon Become A Giant?

Posted on by Rhys

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.

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Shark Week: What Did Megalodon Eat?

Posted on by Rhys

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!

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Shark Week: When & Where Did Megalodon Live?

Posted on by Rhys

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.

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Shark Week: How Big Did Megalodon Get?

Posted on by Rhys

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.

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A shark nerd’s guide to Megalodon: What do we know about this extinct giant shark?

Posted on by Rhys

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.

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Terrible Lizards, Terrible Injuries

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author – James Ormiston
Palaeontology & Evolution MSci Graduate

Dilophosaurus: my favourite dinosaur and one of Jurassic Park’s only celebrity species to actually come from the Jurassic period. This is a dinosaur which, perhaps more so than any other to appear on screen, has suffered a persistent identity crisis thanks to some major creative liberties taken by Crichton and Spielberg to make it more intimidating (and it worked on me, as a child it was by far the one that scared me the most). But that part is already addressed in a previous article on the blog. Today we’re going to take a look at another intriguing aspect of Dilophosaurus which could tell us a lot about what it was like to walk in its…um…dino-shoes? Di-loafers-aurus? Maybe let’s leave the palaeo-puns in the ground…

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Ghosts in the Machine: The Mysterious World of Palaeovirology

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author – James Ormiston
Palaeontology MSci Graduate

How do you do study an aspect of ancient life that doesn’t leave behind fossils? Is it even palaeontology if the thing you’re studying wasn’t technically alive in the first place? After all, that’s what the “onto” part means! These are the problems tackled by the strange sub-field of palaeovirology.

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The Cambrian is the Coolest of all Geological Periods – CHANGE MY MIND

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author – Elvira Piqueras Ricote
Palaeobiology MSc Graduate

Whenever someone asks what I am studying at university and I reply with “Palaeobiology”, I get one of two possible responses: the first one is a very confused face through which I can see the person’s brain hard at work trying to figure out what that means, it has the word biology in it…but what on earth is Palaeo? The second one is “OH! DINOSAURS!”. Well, let me tell you a secret, I never actually liked dinosaurs. Don’t get me wrong, they are pretty impressive creatures, quite cool to look at, but that’s where my enthusiasm and interest begins and ends.

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In Defence Of Early Mammals – Part Two

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author – Kim Chandler, MSc
2020 Palaeobiology Graduate

In the first part of this blog post, I discussed three early mammals that I found interesting and felt needed a bigger audience of admirers. Below is a continuation of these with four more mammals to persuade you to join team mammal.

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In Defence Of Early Mammals – Part One

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author – Kim Chandler, MSc
2020 Palaeobiology Graduate

When discussing Palaeontology the topics of most interest rarely include mammals earlier than the charismatic megafauna like the woolly mammoth and the saber-tooths. Mammals first appeared in the Late Triassic, evolving from a group of animals called synapsids (such as Dimetrodon). The mammals that were first on the scene in the Mesozoic, are usually dismissed as tiny rodent-like things of little interest, especially when compared to the enigmatic dinosaurs they shared their habitat with. However, these guys are interesting in their own way, either due to the transitionary period of evolution at which they sat, or their ecology. (more…)