As long as a bus, weighing tons and palm-sized teeth: the megalodon was a shark of superlatives. And he may have taken a leading position in the marine food webs, such as no other predator of the oceans has reached since then. This is suggested by a paper by Emma Kas from Princeton University and her team in "Science Advances". During the life of the giant shark during the Miocene and Pliocene, the food chain may have been a little longer than it is today.
For their study, KAS and CO relied on a new technology that analyzed food chains based on the ratio of nitrogen isotopes in organic molecules from the enamel. This corresponds to the corresponding nitrogen values from the tooth collages, which is used in today's sharks to determine their position in the food chain. The higher an animal ranks there, the greater the ratio of nitrogen-15 to nitrogen-14, as they absorb more nitrogen-15 with their food.
In the megalodon, the team found significantly higher nitrogen-15 levels than in great white sharks, polar bears or killer whales. From this it concludes that the megalodon captured even more carnivores than other living or extinct apex predators of the oceans – at least all known so far. It is known that the shark hunted minke whales, and other sharks have also fallen victim to it.
However, the scientists detected a wide range of nitrogen-15 contents in the megalodon teeth: not every conspecific thus reached the top of the food chain. This position could not prevent extinction anyway. Climate changes at the end of the Pliocene and the advent of agile great White sharks caused the species to disappear 2.6 million years ago.
