What Killed the Megalodon?

How did the Megalodon go extinct. Let's figure it out.

Sources:

[bkjeong]

The idea orcas outcompeted megalodon ignores two key issues:

- Orcas only became capable of hunting larger prey like marine mammals after megalodon was already gone. Ancestral orcas like O. citoniensis were much closer to bottlenose dolphins in size, dental hardware and diet. Even newborn megalodon (let alone the adults) would have been hunting larger prey than what these small ancestral orcas were mostly going after.

- megalodon didn’t actually evolve in a setting free of mammalian competitors. If anything, its heyday of the Late Miocene saw the greatest diversity of raptorial cetaceans the world has ever seen, including not only Livyatan (which actually went extinct BEFORE megalodon did after coexisting for around 7 million years, so it didn’t outcompete the shark either) but also many more raptorial sperm whale species around the size of orcas (which were not only competing with, but also being eaten by megalodon and possibly by Livyatan as well). Thus, even if modern orcas had ever met megalodon (which they didn’t), they wouldn’t really be bringing anything to the table that megalodon hadn’t seen before.

[robertfeldmann]

i wish computer animators would get creative and Stop making Megalodon's look like Giant Great Whites

[tommothomas]

Yet another very well presented video. Keep them coming!

[Jane-ozpp]

woop woop, the very dude who reignited my love for sharks returns

[Hepler-sb]

Usually when an animal goes extinct, it's not just one thing! It's usually a combination of things so a chain of supernovas could have gone off, after water temperatures have changed and food became more more scarce! I'm not saying what I just said there is exactly what happened! What I'm saying is it's usually probably a combination of things and then a final nail in the coffin could have been a chain of supernovas.

[saddy]

These videoes are super great, keep up the good work

[Average_gaming_life.]

Meg is definitely extinct but I wonder how many strange and magnificent animal we still don’t know about marine or terrestrial

[serafinmagic]

Top predators are surprisingly fragile. Changes in environment tend to take out predators first. There were hundreds of species of whales at the time of the meg, needed to support a breeding population of huge predators.

[Rednecknerd_rob]

Wild World quoting Obi-Wan: Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Me: Then I'm truly a Sith.

[BreadApologist]

Oh that was my bad. When I was doing time vacationing I accidentally dropped some contaminated time travel fuel into the ocean. It’s particularly lethal to large sharks.

[ihrv]

Could we maybe have a longer brief on why they feel the dating was 1 million years off? I mean that’s an extremely large confidence interval if it was previously determined to have gone extinct 2.6 million years ago. It sounds like all it’s saying is we have no confidence in the dating techniques whatsoever, it’s difficult to then just accept the new measure of 3.6 million years. Hope I am not playing devils advocate but I find it important to tell people about our ancient biological ancestry, along with why we claim such things. This prediction error really throws a wrench in things in terms of relying on dating techniques.

[patrickcarino]

You sound familiar, did you have another channel?

[stephenstine]

I don't think the competition hypothesis is a very good fit. FYI, Livyatan is thought to have gone extinct several million years before the Megalodon, so it is highly unlikely to have solely led to the shark's extinction. Also, modern-day orcas did not evolve until around a million years ago. The ancestors of orcas at the time of Megalodon was a much smaller animal of only around 3 meters, I doubt they would have been any serious competition for the vastly larger Megalodon. As to sharks such as great whites or tigers causing Megalodon's extinction, the megatooth shark existed for approximately 20 million years, and much of its existence dealt with sharks far larger than tigers or great whites, such as other megatooth sharks.

It would seem highly unlikely that great whites or tigers alone would contribute to Megalodon's demise. However, some level of coincidental competition along with more prominent factors, such as potential migration of many whales to colder Waters, the closing of the Isthmus of Panama, shifting climates leading to loss of nurseries, and the mutual extinction of many cetaceans and loss of cetacean diversity probably contributed as multiple factors to the shark's extinction.

[pohidie]

Megalogone hahaha it did make me laugh

[bazpearce]

We have great difficulty in understanding modern extinction as it is. Those that happened millions of years ago are gonna be nye on impossible to fully comprehend.

[ThePaleoTheorist]

Meg would evolve over millions of years and become a different shark (if it was still alive). So meg is fully gone

[anthonylocke]

sorry to repeat myself...good vid doe 👍

[hiddentruth]

and here I was thinking a mewon was a space cat.

[Lammington]

I am alarmingly distracted by my need to confirm if the plural of supernova is supernovas or supernovae.

[EpixPlayz-zp]

I always assumed they went extinct to lack of food. A shark their size would have trouble finding food, no matter if they were young or aged.