Reimagining the Megalodon, the World's Most Terrifying Sea Creature
The ancient beast of the oceans comes to life in a new display at the National Museum of Natural History
Artist Gary Staab assembles the massive megalodon. A scale model at the bottom right shows what the finished creature will look like. (Ryan Donnell)
By Arik Gabbai
Smithsonian Magazine
June 2019
When I reached the world’s pre-eminent sculptor of long-dead monsters, he was standing atop a ladder inside a 16-foot-tall section of a megalodon tail that was propped upright in his warehouse-size studio. “I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m inside a bathroom,” Gary Staab said on his cellphone. The tail was part of a 52-foot-long, life-size model of the prehistoric shark that Staab was custom-building for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
The mighty megalodon, terror of the ancient oceans, could grow to 60 feet long, with a mouth stretching more than 9 feet wide and a bite-force stronger than any other creature ever, living or dead. The violent damage it caused to its prey, and the rows of serrated teeth, have given the shark the reputation of an enormous prehistoric Jaws—“a great white on steroids,” says Hans Sues, chair of paleobiology at the museum.
In fact, Sues says, evidence suggests that megalodons, which lived between 23 million and 3.6 million years ago, were more closely related to modern mako sharks than to great whites, giving them more slender bodies than great whites and a bronzy back befitting a predator that preferred coastal waters.
Plentiful megalodon teeth (and a number of calcified vertebrae) have been found in ancient seafloors that are now exposed—in the cliffs along the Chesapeake Bay, for example. Those fossils were all Staab was going to get: Like modern sharks, the megalodon’s skeleton was made from cartilage, which decomposes. So to design the model, he and his museum collaborators used a formula that extrapolates from tooth length and the body geometry of modern relatives, and found that his shark would be 24 feet across the front fins. “That’s the size of a Cessna,” he told me.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/reimagining-megalodon-worlds-most-terrifying-sea-creature-180972193/#cPoZhgYEJ8To5S88.99
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