Ocean scanner registers 50-foot ‘Megalodon’ shape in Atlantic

“The Megalodon disappeared more than three million years ago and will likely stay that way, but, for a few minutes, we thought he had returned!” researchers say

An ocean scanner in the Atlantic has picked up a shape 50 feet long, leading some researchers to temporarily believe that the Megalodon giant shark may not be extinct.

The Atlantic Shark Institute wrote on Instagram on Monday: “Does the Meg exist? On a recent shark research trip, we were all amused to see this shape appear on our fish finder for several minutes. Based on the length of the image, we estimated the ‘Meg’ to be about 50 feet long, weighing in at 40 tons!”

The infamous prehistoric giant shark was portrayed in the 2018 film The Meg.

“We waited for one of the rods to go off however, much to our disappointment, the shape started to transition into a large school of Atlantic mackeral that hung around the boat for about 15 minutes,” the institute added. “So close, but so far! The Megalodon (Otodus megalodon), disappeared more than 3 million years ago and will likely stay that way, but, for a few minutes, we thought he had returned!”

The largest great white shark ever registered is a female named Deep Blue, which was discovered in Mexico in 2014. At over 50 years old, she was found to be about 6.1 metres long (20 feet) and weighing about 2,000 kg (4,400 pounds).

Megalodon fossils suggest that the massive shark first appeared some 20 million years ago. It dominated the oceans for the following 13 million years before going extinct around 3.6 million years ago, according to the London Natural History Museum.

The Megalodon “was not only the biggest shark in the world, but one of the largest fish ever to exist. Estimates suggest it grew to between 15 and 18 metres in length (49 to 59 feet), three times longer than the largest recorded great white shark,” the museum website states. “Without a complete megalodon skeleton, these figures are based on the size of the animal’s teeth, which can reach 18 centimetres long. In fact, the word megalodon simply means ‘large tooth’.”

According to the museum, “the oldest definitive ancestor of megalodon is a 55-million-year-old shark known as Otodus obliquus, which grew to around 10 metres in length. But the evolutionary history of this shark is thought to stretch back to Cretalamna appendiculata, dating to 105 million years old – making the lineage of megalodon over 100 million years old”.

The curator of the musuem’s fish fossils, Emma Bernard, said on the site that “we can find lots of their teeth off the east coast of North America, along the coasts and at the bottom of saltwater creeks and rivers of North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida”.

Ms Bernard has also poured cold water on the idea that a Megalodon may still be out there.

“No. It’s definitely not alive in the deep oceans, despite what the Discovery Channel has said in the past,” she said. “If an animal as big as megalodon still lived in the oceans, we would know about it.”