OLogy Cards > megalodon

Correct!

Like other sharks, megalodon had a skeleton made of cartilage, which doesn’t fossilize well. Megalodon fossils are very rare—except for teeth. With nothing but chompers to go on (plus a few vertebrae), scientists don’t know exactly what megalodon looked like.

Correct!

Climate change likely played a role in megalodon’s extinction. Megalodon had a hard time staying alive in cooler water. Its prey did too, so megalodon likely had trouble finding enough to eat. Eventually it may have lost out to its smaller competitor, the great white shark.

Correct!

Megalodon evolved 23 million years ago. That might seem like a long time ago, but it is long after large dinosaurs went extinct, and even longer after trilobites. Megalodon lived until 3.6 million years ago, and Australopithecus afarensis, the species that the famous hominin Lucy (pictured here) belonged to, lived 4–3 million years ago. So megalodon swam the oceans at the same time that Lucy and her relatives walked on Earth.