The megalodon shark, Otodus megalodon, lived about 23 to 3.6 million years ago. It is generally accepted as the largest predatory shark that ever lived.
(Calvert Marine Museum/Tim Scheirer)- Using widely accepted formulas for figuring the length of a megalodon, the math class got widely different results.
- That led two researchers to devise a new method using the width of a tooth, instead of length.
- The new method shows megalodon could have grown to more than 65 feet.
The megalodon is generally accepted as the largest predatory shark that ever lived. Now, thanks to a high school math lesson, scientists have a new method to estimate a megalodon's length, and they think the marine giants may have been larger than previously thought.
Otodus megalodon lived about 23 to 3.6 million years ago. All that remains of them are fossilized teeth and a few, rare vertebrae, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.
As with most of today's sharks, the megalodon's skeleton was made of cartilage that, like other soft tissues, decomposed eons ago.
For more than 100 years, scientists used the fossilized teeth to try to estimate how big megalodon grew. Early estimates of the size of adult megalodons ranged from 30 feet to nearly 100 feet. More recent studies, which used the length of the teeth to extrapolate the length of the shark, put megalodons at 50 to 60 feet.
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Using the new way to estimate length and the largest known upper tooth of a megalodon, researchers found the shark was a little longer than 65 feet.
In 2015, a fossil collector donated a nearly complete set of teeth from the same megalodon shark to the Florida Museum. That's important, because in addition to the length of the fossilized tooth, the equations for figuring how long the shark was require knowing where the tooth was positioned in the shark's jaws. Most of that was based on guesswork and comparisons to great white sharks.
Having a nearly complete set of teeth let researchers know where each tooth had been in the megalodon's jaws.
Victor Perez, who was a doctoral student at the Florida Museum of Natural History, discovered that equations that used the length of a megalodon tooth to estimate the overall length of the shark could produce widely varying estimates.
(Florida Museum of Natural History photos/Kristen Grace)Victor Perez, who was a doctoral student at the Florida Museum of Natural History, used 3D-printed replicas of the teeth to create a math lesson for a high school class. The students would measure the teeth and calculate the shark's length using the accepted set of equations.
He said he expected their results to vary by a few millimeters, but they ranged from about 40 to 148 feet for the same shark.
“I was going around, checking, like, did you use the wrong equation? Did you forget to convert your units?” Perez said in a Florida Museum blog post. “But it very quickly became clear that it was not the students that had made the error. It was simply that the equations were not as accurate as we had predicted.”
Perez, who is now the assistant curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland, shared the story in a fossil community newsletter. That led to a French paleontologist suggesting using the width of the tooth instead of the length. The width of the tooth would be limited by the size of the shark's jaw, and the jaw would be proportional to the overall length of the shark, previous research had suggested.
Perez and Ronny Maik Leder, then a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum, developed new equations based on tooth width to determine a shark's length.
Using sets of fossil teeth from 11 individual sharks, representing five species including megalodon, Perez and Leder developed a model for how wide an individual tooth was in relation to the jaw.
They published their work in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.
Now anyone with a single megalodon tooth can compare its size with the averages in the study to estimate how big the shark was.
“The simple beauty of this method must have been too obvious to be seen. Our model was much more stable than previous approaches," Leder, now director of the Natural History Museum in Leipzig, Germany, said in the blog post. "This collaboration was a wonderful example of why working with amateur and hobby paleontologists is so important.”
Perez said the new method still has a range of error of about 10 feet because of how much individual sharks can vary.
Also, researchers still don't know exactly how wide megalodon jaws were or whether the teeth might have overlapped or had gaps between them.
“Even though this potentially advances our understanding, we haven’t really settled the question of how big megalodon was. There’s still more that could be done, but that would probably require finding a complete skeleton at this point,” Perez said.
No complete fossilized jaw of a megalodon has been found because the skeleton was made of cartilage that long ago decomposed. Fossilized teeth and a few, rare vertebrae have been found.
(Florida Museum of Natural History/Jeff Gage)The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.
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June 10, 2021 at 01:08AM
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