A squad of researchers size up the teeth of great white sharks and those of the out elephantine shark Otodus megalodon believe that challenger for food between the two coinage may have contributed to the megalodon ’s extinction .
Great white sharks ( Carcharodon carcharias ) are apex predators that cangrowup to 20 groundwork tenacious and press around 5,000 pounds . The much more massive ( about 60 - foot ) megalodonswent nonextant about 3.6 million years ago , but for a time in the Pliocene Epoch , the two mintage coexist and also competed , to the mortification of the megalodon . The dietetic competition between the two fauna , as attest by zinc level in their teeth , is described in a raw studypublishedtoday in Nature Communications .
Unlike grounds of a shark ’s curt - condition food use — bite fool on bones , fossilized stomach contents , and shark dejection — the zinc signal in tooth enamel points to the farsighted - term dietary use of an beast . The zinc isotopes are a proxy for diet and signal their trophic levels , or their place on the solid food chain .
A great white sharkPhoto: Ryan Pierse (Getty Images)
“ The ratio of heavier to light atomic number 30 changes in body tissue compared to the dieting providing us with a way to cross the relative position of an beast in its food for thought chain , ” say study lead generator Jeremy McCormack , a geoscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig , Germany , and Goethe - University Frankfurt , in an email to Gizmodo .
McCormack ’s squad inspect atomic number 30 isotope in shark teeth from 20 extant coinage , as well as 12 fossil species besides O. megalodon . As it turns out , the trophic level of cracking whitened sharks and megalodons overlapped , indicating at least some contest between the two species took spot .
Like many predators in the animal kingdom , megalodons were plausibly competing for survival from the earliest moments of their life . Previous research has indicated that newly hatchedmegalodons may have eat their unhatched siblings , a appendage called oophagy ( filial cannibalism ) , to get an early fit of nutrition .
A suspected O. megalodon tooth.Photo: -/AFP (Getty Images)
The opinion that corking Caucasian vie with megalodons until the latter went extinct has beenpreviously suggested , and this research offers new grounds that competition may have played a cardinal role . “ Our new study shows that the dietary reach of the Early Pliocene great whitened shark is very similar to that of megalodon , indicating that our datum do not contradict the contention hypothesis , ” McCormack tell .
The researchers take note that competition would n’t have been the lone contributor to megalodon extinction ; mood change probably make for a role , along with the flop of quarry population . fundamentally , the megalodons were n’t beget enough food because the world itself was changing , and the ravening appetite of its ( relatively ) scrawny cousin did n’t help .
More : Newborn Megalodons Were Larger Than Adult Humans and believably Ate Their Siblings
Apex predatorsChemistryGreat white sharkPhysical sciencesPredation
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