A Dozen Floating Stars

The largest living sharks are Great Whites. They can grow to twenty feet – as long from nose to tail as an adult giraffe can be from head to toe. None of the sharks at our aquarium are half that size. But there’s a reconstructed jaw on display there from a megalodon, which lived 23 million to around 3 million years ago. Its fossilized teeth are as long as human hands. People like to be photographed standing behind the jaws, as if the extinct creature swallowed them whole. Until recently we’ve had to imagine the megalodons’ length, because teeth are all we have left of them. But a new study led by the University of Bristol and Swansea University has produced a mathematical method of estimating the size of the monster sharks. They compared the fossil teeth to five modern sharks, and determined megalodons were about 40 feet long, with 6-foot fins. Useless information, but oh, so cool!