Megalodon... Imagine!

Let's pretend I went back three million years in time and caught an adult Megalodon in a giant magic fishing net. A snap, no pun intended.
What kind of a set-up would I need? What kind of filtration system(s)? Water specs? How big will he be in length and weight roughly? What will it eat other than killer whales and great whites? Those live foods aren't available at my LFS, don't know why. :p
I just keep missing the Megalodon show on Discovery every time and want to know more about this crazy unbelievable saltwater fish! You all must know...
 

bdhough

Active Member
Ha. Good question. Ill leave it to the sharks to answer. You need a big friggin tank. Bigger than anything out there i'd imagine. Maybe as big as an entire aquarium....
 

fshhub

Active Member
not sure, but if i recollect right, they got to be about 60 or 65 ft in length. and they were quite the swimmer, constantly moving, so definitely you would need a tank of at least gargantuan size. maybe about a 2000 gallon? lol and j/k . Seriously though, that leads me to believe that the tanks at seaworld would not even be large enough. and tehir diet, well nothing available would be enough to feed them either.
 
I just did some research.
The megalodon was up to 83 feet long! A nice-size great white is only 20 feet. This creature was many several times the mass of a great white.
It ruled the oceans for 20 million years and disapeared 2 million years ago. Teeth the size of a human hand are commonly found in southern Maryland I think, an area covered in ocean 15 million years ago.
It's jaws were over 6.5 feet wide and over 6.5 feet high.
 
Ahh megalodon, Now that is a shark !! They are the long lost relative of the great white. Scientists believe that they where also similar in body design, this animal dined on anything. They have a number of fossils whale vertebrae that have had meg teeth imbedded in them, also there are tons of whale bones that show scarring from the teeth a of a megalodon. To keep one , they would need to build an enclosed bay for one. It would make the any of the whale tanks at sea world look like a fish bowl. They speculate that like the great white these sharks needed to keep moving, so they would need something HUGE !!!
I discovered megalodons about 12 years ago when I made a stop over in South Carolina at some town called I think Murrel , Murkells (something like that) inlet. I went wondering down by the river looking for gators and snakes after walking about a half an hour I saw a really weird rock picked it up and could not believe it, it was a sharks tooth. I thought it was a joke and kept it. When I got back to the truck I showed it to a local and he told me what it was. I kept it and did a little reading on them and been hooked since. I have also found 2 more in Florida as well as a bunch of smaller ones and one large prehistoric mako tooth. Here are some pics of them.
This is the one I found in South Carolina It measures almost five and half inches long.

These two found with friends in Florida, with in two days of each other. There were big storms out to sea and the tide washed them in. The first one is five and a quarter inches, with a little damage to one side, but still VERY impressive.

This is the second one I found, it is a little over two inches long. For the movie buffs, this is the size of the tooth that Hooper pulled out of the hull of the boat in the movie jaws.

Here is all three together.

This is a mako tooth it is a little over an inch.

Ohh the serrations on the megalodon teeth are still quite sharp.
For those who like to read fiction, there are a couple of thriller novels out by Steve Alten about a megalodon loose in modern day. VERY GOOD BOOKS!! If you like shark stories ;)
Good post smokinstarfish
Had to share the fossils !!
Brian
 
Actually that books basis isnt too far from the unreal as far as theories go. I have read several articles about the possibilities of megs being trapped below the freezing cold layer in the ocean in the massive unexplored deeps. Nice ideas, be cool if it were true but reality-wise even in those massively deep areas I would find it hard to believe a race of 80 foot sharks has escaped all notice for so long. But then again those giant squid are still super rare so who knows?
 
The little tooth was actually as big as the hugely-over-exaggerated Jaws movies!
Snakes'n'fish, I'm unofficially nominating you to be this site's megalodon guy. I just eat this stuff up... tell more... how much did it weigh compared to a great white? Why did it go extinct? Or did it just evolve into the white? What kinds of animals existed at its time that it could have ate?
Evolution is just amazing!
 
smokinstarfish, I am far from being an expert on these guys. I have just been interested in them since I found the first tooth.
With what they would eat would probably be whales, large fish and anything else that would fit in there mouths.
Melody , If these guys were still around there is a good chance it would have taken longer to discover america. As for something that big coming at me NO WAY !! :eek:
Terminus, I don't know about those articles either. One would think that a sixty foot shark would be seen, but like the giant squid and those extremely large deep water sharks there is always chance they are still here.
I think one of the best parts of the book MEG is the prologue, If you are at arnes and noble, pick up a copy and read the prologue, think that is the best way to describe the power of the megalodon.
 

aarone

Active Member
With what they would eat would probably be whales, large fish and anything else that would fit in there mouths.
so basically anything huh?:D
 
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