Megalodon wasn’t as chonky as a great white shark, experts say

Fresh evidence points to megalodon being longer, more slender than previous depictions.

The megalodon, a giant shark that went extinct some 3.6 million years ago, is famous for its utterly enormous jaws and correspondingly huge teeth. Recent studies have proposed that the megalodon was a robust species of shark akin to today's great white sharks, only three times longer. And just like the great white shark inspired Jaws, the megalodon has also inspired a 1997 novel and a blockbuster film (2018's The Meg)—not to mention a controversial bit of "docu-fiction" on the Discovery Channel. But now a team of 26 shark experts is challenging the great white shark comparison, arguing in a new paper published in the journal Paleontologia Electronica that the super-sized creature's body was more slender and possibly even longer than researchers previously thought.

“Our study suggests that the modern great white shark may not necessarily serve as a good modern analogue for assessing at least certain aspects of its biology, including its size,” co-author Kenshu Shimada, a palaeobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago, told The Guardian. “The reality is that we need the discovery of at least one complete megalodon skeleton to be more confident about its true size as well as its body form.” Thus far, nobody has found a complete specimen, only fossilized teeth and vertebrae.