There’s very few things we know about the megalodon shark for certain. We know that it was one of the largest marine predators on the planet, reaching lengths of over 60 feet. We know that it first appeared in the fossil record nearly 20 million years ago and that it indisputably went extinct nearly 2.5 million years ago.
Otherwise, the massive meg is mostly a mystery.
That’s why the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Science recently awarded Sora Kim and her colleagues from the University of California-Merced a $204,000 grant to study the often misunderstood prehistoric predator.
According to Kim’s proposal, the “project uses isotopic ‘fingerprinting’ of teeth to reconstruct not only the body temperatures, but also dietary behavior and seawater chemistry of ‘megalodon’ and other shark species during the past 15 million years.”
One of the key questions that Kim hopes to answer is why the megalodon disappeared as other similar shark species continued to survive.
“There are many ideas about why the megalodon went extinct,” Kim said in a press release. “Scientists have argued that changes in the megalodon’s available prey base combined with climate change led to their demise. But these are just hypotheses. There have been no rigorous studies that demonstrate this conclusively.”
