One of the unique items in the Smoky Mountain Relic Room is giant fossilized teeth from prehistoric megalodon sharks. An extinct species, Carcharocles megalodon, inhabited the earth from the early Miocene Epoch, around 23 million years ago, to the Pliocene Epoch, 2.6 million years ago. The earliest ancestors of homo sapiens arose 100,000 years after the megalodon went extinct.
One of the largest predators that ever existed, the megalodon, reached lengths between 15 and 18 meters, roughly three times the length of the largest great white shark. Its size was comparable to today’s whale sharks, slow-moving carpet sharks that rely on filter feeding. By contrast, the megalodon was an apex predator with a diet of large prey, including small dolphins and even humpback whales.
Enabling it to eat prey as large as whales, the megalodon’s jaw was between 2.7 to 3.4 meters long when fully opened. This would fit two average adult people laid side-by-side. Lining the jaw were 276 teeth, which gave it a bite force of up to 182,201 Newtons (N). By contrast, the maximal human bite force is 1,31N, while great whites have an 18,216N bite force. The shark’s diet is known by artifacts such as a fossilized whale rib bone that contains an embedded megacolon tooth tip.
Interestingly, scientists have changed depictions of megadolon over the decades. Paleontologists initially envisioned the species as looking like a super-sized great white shark. However, the prehistoric megalodon had a rostrum, or nose, much shorter than its contemporary counterpart. Its jaw was flatter as well, with an almost squashed appearance.
The pectoral fins were lengthy and could support the shark’s larger size and weight. There is no direct ancestral connection between the megalodon and the great white, with the prehistoric shark being the last of its lineage.
The fossil record of the megalodon is dominated by its teeth, and each shark goes through a set of teeth every two weeks. Across a full lifetime, this added up to as many as 40,000 teeth. With humans, teeth have approximately the same hardness as bone, which is coated in calcium phosphate mineral. By contrast, shark skeletons are made up of soft cartilage similar to that in the human ear and nose. This means that, unlike teeth, they rarely survived through the millennia.
The megalodon’s extinction is due to a changing climate, with cooling temperatures sending populations of many marine animals plummeting. As tiny organisms die off at the bottom of the food chain, intermediaries such as sea birds and turtles also go extinct.
The megalodon thrived in warm tropical waters without control over its internal body temperature. It could not follow prey to cooler waters that other fish adapted to (as with whale migrations to the Arctic). Great white and megalodon diets overlapped, and competition for scant food resources may have also contributed to the species’ decline.
Megalodon teeth are popular among collectors and are measured using the diagonal length, which extends from the root corner to the tip. Baby teeth can be as small as an inch long, while mature adult specimens typically range from four to five inches long. Extremely rare finds include seven-inch specimens valued in the tens of thousands of dollars.
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