This lead to many of the original estimates being revisited. Originally the Megalodon was believed to be closely related to the Great White, but as more fossil evidence has emerged, it's been discovered these two sharks are not in fact closely related. That size has held up relatively well through the modern day, and has been reaffirmed with newer techniques used for studying fossil evidence. The new ways of studying these issues led to improved knowledge about the structure of the jaw, and also about how muscles provide structure through the jaw and into the rest of the body.Īfter careful consideration of Dean's findings, the size of Megalodon was revised downward, to be about 70 percent of the original assumption (around 21 meters, or 68.6 feet). Over time, the development of scientific methods led to better ways of determining the size of extinct animals based on fossil evidence and jaw reconstruction. That was just the first thought on the size of Megalodon, though. Based on the jaw reconstruction, Megalodon was estimated to be 30 metres (98 feet) long. In 1909, Bashford Dean made the first attempt to reconstruct the Megalodon's jaw, in order to get a true estimation of size. Compare that to the Great White Shark that maxes out at about 21 feet and 3 1/2 tons. Most current, scientifically accepted estimates for the Megalodon's maximum size fall into the 60-70 foot range, with a weight of 50-70 tons. This leaves teeth as the only common fossils from which scientists can compute the size for this massive shark. One of the issues in estimating it's true size is that the skeletons of sharks are made out of cartilage which does not easily fossilize. Over the years the size estimations of the Megalodon shark have changed, as the science surrounding it's evolution has progressed. The sperm whale is a little bit longer, but also lighter. The Megalodon was the largest known predator in the history of the Earth, at least based on its weight.
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