How Big was Megalodon?
Comparing the largest known White Shark teeth with those of Megalodon seems a natural way to figure out how large the fossil species was. Ichthyologist John E. Randall was the first to point out that in the White Shark, the largest upper teeth (second anteriors) are about as tall as the jaw that contains them is high. The early Megalodon reconstructions, however, featured jaws about three times too high in proportion to the teeth. Randall also suggested that there is a more-or-less direct linear correlation between a White Shark’s tooth enamel height and its total length. When Randall plotted a graph of tooth enamel height for white sharks of known length and the enamel height for the largest-known megalodon teeth, the position of the latter correlated to a total length of about 43 feet (13 metres). How could the museum curators have been so far off in their estimated size of Megalodon? Apparently, the original reconstructions relied on fossil teeth collected from several sites (thus r
