What was the Megalodon? Discovery Channel kicked off Shark Week with a fictional documentary style film about the possibility the prehistoric shark still roams the ocean.
The film has a lot of people questioning whether or not the creature actually existed. The shark did in fact live at one time. The ferocious animals went extinct two-million years ago when the extreme climate change of the Ice Age wiped out the Megalodon's source of food, large prehistoric whales.
Like modern sharks the Megalodon was a fish made up of cartilage. There are no fossilized bones left of the animals because they did not have a skeletal structure, like a T-Rex or other prehistoric animals. What are left of the Megalodon are the creatures' jaws and teeth.
The massive mouth of these fish could very easily swallow a school bus. If the creature were alive today and attacked a human, it would be like a freight train with mouth full of knives striking you. At least that is how the Discovery Channel film explained the scenario.
The Megalodon was like no shark we know of today. It could grow up between 60 and 100 feet long. Megalodon's mouth was filled with 46 front row teeth, 24 in the upper jaw and 22 in the lower jaw. According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, "Most sharks have at least six rows of teeth, so a Megalodon had about 276 teeth at any given time."
Latin Times has created a slide show made up of photographs and animations detailing what a Megalodon would have looked like when it lived over two million years ago.