With a length equivalent to that of a five-story building, a fearsome set of teeth made up of almost three hundred pieces and a bite force ten times greater than that of the great white shark, the megalodon had no competition in the Miocene oceans. But his superiority did not always translate into victory as a predator.
Great white sharks – the living animal to which the megalodon is most closely compared – lose their prey on occasion. And the same thing could have happened to the extinct giant. At least, that is the explanation for some extraordinary fossils, two vertebrae of a whale and a megalodon tooth, from 15 million years ago found in the cliffs of Calvert, Maryland (USA) and that have been studied by researchers from the Calvert Marine Museum (CMM) and the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT).
As explained in the journal ‘Palaeontologia Electronica’, the whale, about 4 meters long, could have been attacked by the megalodon. “The attack bent the whale’s spine so much that it basically broke its back,” Stephen J. Godfrey, curator of paleontology at Calvert, explains to this newspaper. However, somehow the victim managed to escape the assault and managed to survive two more months.
One of the vertebrae retains evidence of a major compression fracture. For this type of injury to occur, the whale’s vertebrae had to have been bent very forcefully into such a sharp curve that the pressure of the adjacent front vertebra crushed the other. This would have been a terribly painful injury to the whale.
CT scans of the fossils show how the vertebra was broken. The lower anterior end was broken off and telescoped into the unbroken lower part.
attack from below
The discovery of a single megatoothed shark tooth (Otodus megalodon) next to the vertebrae led investigators to blame him for the attack. The tooth was not embedded in the vertebrae nor do they have bite marks, but from other fossil finds it is known that this giant successfully fed on both whales and dolphins.
One of the two whale vertebrae. The bottom is badly broken, something that happened while the animal was alive
“Live great white sharks often ambush their prey by attacking from below, so it’s possible the megalodon did the same. However, we don’t know for sure if the attack came from below, from the back, or even if there was a mega-attack, although that is our favorite interpretation of the pathologies preserved in these two small whale vertebrae,” says Godfrey.
whale spasms
Scientists acknowledge that this is circumstantial evidence. Other macro-predators, although smaller, also inhabited the area, including sharks Parotodus benedeni and one of the ancestors of the living great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias. The possibility that the lesion was caused by an attack by a Miocene macroraptorial sperm whale cannot be ruled out either.
Similarly, the authors assessed whether the fractures were caused by seizures or spasms. Domoic acid poisoning from harmful algal blooms is known to cause convulsions in whales and is implicated in the death of newborn baleen whales. It is unlikely, but possible, that a large whale would be affected by this poisoning to the point of having a seizure causing a spinal fracture. Similarly, protozoan infections cause convulsions in toothed and baleen whales, although physical diagnosis of this is impossible in a fossil.
great suffering
What seems clear is that the whale suffered a lot. The severity of the traumatic injury is on a par with that seen in modern whales that have sustained human-induced trauma, such as blunt-force injuries to the skull and vertebrae from ship strikes. But compression fractures like the one seen in the fossil whale have yet to be reported in living specimens.
The megalodon tooth
Despite the whale’s gruesome encounter with the megalodon, the cetacean survived for a period of about two months, something scientists know from how the wounds began to heal on their own. “The whale didn’t live long after the trauma because there are large areas where there should be new bone growth, but it didn’t. So he died despite his valiant attempt to heal completely. We do not know what ended his life: infection, starvation, another predatory attack… », says the researcher. It didn’t hold out for long, but not everyone can claim to have survived the biggest shark attack of all time.