Sea Monsters: "...They May Have Fought Each Other"

A while back we talked about C. megalodon, the giant, prehistoric shark that could have swallowed a modern submarine. It's a little terrifying to imagine critters that big roaming the oceans but when I do I console myself with the fact that modern whales, now the most common large sea creatures, are some of the gentlest animals on the planet. Modern whales being the operative phrase.

Last week I found this article from BBC online which tells us yet again about a huge carnivore that once roamed the seas. In this case, the creature was a giant whale with teeth in the neighborhood of a foot long. From the article:

[The whale] is thought to have been more than 17 m long, and might have engaged in fierce battles with other giant sea creatures of the time... Leviathan was an aggressive predator.

You read that correctly, by the way. Dr.Christian de Muizon of the Natural History Museum, Paris, who led the excavation team that found the mega-whale's skeleton in Peru, named the creature Leviathan. As he tells us:

It is interesting to note that at the same time in the same waters was another monster, which was a giant shark...

That would be our pal C. megalodon and that's just plane shudder inducing. Honestly, it is no wonder our seafaring ancestors got a little sketchy when they lost sight of land. Maybe, like fear of the dark, a primate instinct to fear huge, sharp-toothed monsters followed them onto the ocean.

The fossil skull of the whale, which is approximately 9 feet long, was found in 2008 on the last day of de Muizon's team's dig. The scientists immediately recognized it as similar to the skull of a sperm whale but, once they examined the teeth, they knew that they were dealing with a very different animal. Individual whale teeth of the type found with the skull had been identified before, but this discovery confirmed the speculation that they belonged to an aggressive carnivore.

Since Leviathan so resembled another legendary whale whose ferocious behavior is famous, the researchers almost immediately gave their find it's current scientific name. Many of them were fans of Herman Melville's classic Mody Dick. So now this great monster will go down in history as Leviathan melvillei. I'm sure Mr. Melville, whose book was so unjustly panned in his lifetime, would be proud.

Sea Monsters: The Babies Are So Cute

Over at Science Daily online there's an article about the Gutan Formation off the Darien coast of Panama, in the Caribbean. Regular readers of Triple P will be more than familiar with the area, which was a favorite of 17th century buccaneers and 19th century privateers alike. The Formation, a series of sandy outcrops that create a sheltered, warm water mangrove swamp, has been mined for years to make cement. This constant removal of layers revealed an amazing assortment of paleo-shark teeth from the largest of the species ever to swim Earth's oceans.

Carcharocles megalodon was sixty to seventy feet in length in adulthood; it had no natural predators. A single tooth from C. megalodon is the size of a man's hand and by "man" I mean a guy roughly the size of Tyson the Cyclops in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series of books by Rick Riordan. Saying that the animal was mind bogglingly huge is an understatement.

As babies, though, C. megalodon were quite vulnerable to predation, particularly from other sharks. Scientists imagine that the paleo-variety of sharks, like their modern cousins, probably kept their newborns and toddlers near the coast in "nurseries" where shallow water would deter adults from making them snack food. The find of over 400 shark teeth off Panama has yielded many that can positively be identified as the chompers of youthful C. megalodon.

The excavation, which is a bit of a hurry-up operation due to the literal stripping of the Gatun Formation, is a combined effort of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the University of Florida. According to the article two other paleo-shark nurseries have been identified in recent times, both off the coast of South Carolina in the U.S.

The Spanish along the Main would not only refer to the buccaneers of old as ladrones - thieves - but also los tiburones: the sharks. Evidently, long before Francois L'Olonnais and Henry Morgan, there were a lot of really big sharks in the Caribbean.