Megalodon Sharks - SHARK ACADEMY

It's the largest shark you've never seen, and it makes the Great White Shark look like a shrimp…shark. I'm Jonathan Bird and this is Shark Academy! This is a tooth from a Great White Shark. But this is a tooth from a Megalodon shark, which makes the Great White Shark look kind of wimpy. The only problem is, the Megalodon shark is extinct. In spite of the fact that Hollywood would have you believe that the Megalodon lived way back in the Jurassic period with the dinosaurs, it lived from 28 million years ago until about 1.5 million years ago during the Pleistocene era, which is an era that's a lot more like the animated movie Ice Age, with saber-toothed cats, and sloths, and mammoths, and that squirrel. The squirrel. They lived then. If that squirrel went in the ocean, eaten by a Megalodon. One of the problems with researching extinct sharks is the fact that sharks don't leave much of a fossil record. The problem is that sharks have a cartilaginous skeleton that doesn't really leave a fossil. The only thing in a shark that leaves a fossil are the teeth. And the teeth of a Megalodon are the only thing that scientists have to try to figure out how big they were, what they ate, what they looked like. Paleontologists have come up with at least five different ways to try to figure out how big the Megalodon was based on the enormous size of its teeth. All five different ways actually point to the Megalodon being more than 50 feet long, which means that the Megalodon was essentially a great white shark that was as large as or larger than a whale shark, which is pretty big. Well, I hope you enjoyed the Megalodon shark. I'm sorry to tell you that they're extinct, but what are you going to do? They actually are extinct. So if you enjoyed this video and you're not too depressed, you can go check out some videos about actual living sharks in our Shark Academy series. And also check out Jonathan Bird's Blue World, our other series here on our YouTube channel. Of course, if you haven't subscribed, hit the subscribe button and leave us a comment because we'd love to hear from you. I'm Jonathan Bird and this is Shark Academy.