VIDEO: Largest Sharks in the World

This video brings to you the largest sharks out there!

Some are still alive, some have gone extinct.

The scariest, most fierce and dangerous one that’s ever lived is the Megalodon!

According to Wikipedia, among extant species, the great white shark is regarded as the best analogue to C. megalodon. The lack of well-preserved fossil C. megalodon skeletons led scientists to rely on the great white shark as the basis of its reconstruction and size estimation.

Due to fragmentary remains, estimating the size of C. megalodon has been challenging. However, the scientific community has concluded that C. megalodon was larger than the whale shark, Rhincodon typus. Scientists focused on two aspects of size: total length and body mass.

The first attempt to reconstruct the jaw of C. megalodon was made by Bashford Dean in 1909. From the dimensions of this jaw reconstruction, it was hypothesized that C. megalodon could have approached 30 metres (98 ft).

Better knowledge of dentition and more accurate muscle structures, led to a rectified version of Dean’s jaw model about 70 percent of its original size and to a size consistent with modern findings.

To resolve such errors, scientists, aided by new fossil discoveries of C. megalodon and improved knowledge of its closest living analogue’s anatomy, introduced more quantitative methods for estimating its size based on the statistical relationships between the tooth sizes and body lengths. Some methods are mentioned below.

In 1973, Hawaiian ichthyologist John E. Randall used a plotted graph to demonstrate a relationship between the enamel height (the vertical distance of the blade from the base of the enamel portion of the tooth to its tip) of the largest tooth in the upper jaw of the great white shark and the shark’s total length.

Randall extrapolated this method to estimate C. megalodon’s total length. Randall cited two C. megalodon teeth in his work, specimen number 10356 at the American Museum of Natural History and specimen number 25730 at the United States National Museum, which had enamel heights of 115 millimetres (4.5 in) and 117.5 millimetres (4.63 in), respectively.

These teeth yielded a corresponding total length of about 13 metres (43 ft). In 1991, Richard Ellis and John E. McCosker claimed that tooth enamel height does not necessarily increase in proportion to the animal’s total length.

In 1996, after scrutinizing 73 great white shark specimens, Michael D. Gottfried, Leonard Compagno and S. Curtis Bowman proposed a linear relationship between the shark’s total length and the height of the largest upper anterior tooth.

The proposed relationship is: total length in metres = − (0.096) × [UA maximum height (mm)]-(0.22). Gottfried and colleagues then extrapolated their technique to C. megalodon. The biggest C. megalodon tooth in the possession of this team, one discovered by Compagno in 1993, was an upper second anterior specimen, the maximum height of which was 168 millimetres (6.6 in).

It yielded an estimated total length for C. megalodon of 15.9 metres (52 ft). Rumors of larger C. megalodon teeth persisted at the time. The maximum tooth height for this method is measured as a vertical line from the tip of the crown to the bottom of the lobes of the root, parallel to the long axis of the tooth. In layman’s terms, the maximum height of the tooth is its slant height.