Picture credits
The drawings are our own. The photos are from Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons licences (Attribution, or Attribution-ShareAlike), CC0, or in the public domain.
Photos
Carcharocles megalodon (fossil shark tooth) (Yorktown Formation, Upper Miocene to Lower Pliocene; offshore North Carolina, USA) 1.jpg
by James St. John, CC BY 2.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes.
Megalodon American Museum Natural History-20120521-RM-225233.jpg
by Reinhold Möller, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes. Shared here under the same licence.
Megalodon and Otodus obliquus teeth.jpg
by Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes. Shared here under the same licence.
Otodus megalodon restoration.png
by Oliver E. Demuth, CC BY 4.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes.
Megalodon tooth great white shark teeth.jpg
by Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes. Shared here under the same licence.
Carcharocles megalodon (Agassz, 1837) 1.jpg
by Géry PARENT, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes. Shared here under the same licence.
Carcharocles megalodon (Agassiz, 1837) 2.jpg
by Géry PARENT, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes. Shared here under the same licence.
Megalodon tooth ruler.jpg
by TomCatX, from an image by Lonfat (Wikimedia Commons users), Public domain. Cropped and resized; no other changes.
Megalodon jaw.jpg
by Ryan Somma, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes. Shared here under the same licence.
Parietobalaena mandible with Megalodon tooth marks.jpg
by ★Kumiko★, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes. Shared here under the same licence.
Otodus megalodon from Capistrano Fm.png
by Boessenecker et al. (2019), PeerJ, CC BY 4.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes.
Our own drawings
- A to-scale drawing of four shark outlines and a person, all lined up above a ruler marked in metres. From the top: a megalodon 24.3 metres long, the 2025 study’s possible maximum; a whale shark 18.8 metres long, the biggest measured; a megalodon 15 to 18 metres long, the older estimate; a great white about 6 metres long; and a person 1.7 metres tall, tiny by comparison.
Our own drawing - Two shark teeth drawn to scale side by side. A megalodon tooth 17.8 centimetres tall, a big triangle with fine serrated edges, a darker chevron-shaped band called the bourlette, and a wide root. Next to it a great white tooth 5.4 centimetres tall, about a third of the height. Labels point to the crown, serrations, bourlette and root.
Our own drawing - Two timelines. The top one, in deep time, runs from about 110 million years ago to today: a possible Cretalamna ancestor 105 million years ago, the start of the lineage about 60 million years ago according to Smithsonian Ocean, Otodus obliquus 55 million years ago, and megalodon from 23 million years ago. The lower timeline zooms in on the Miocene and Pliocene: megalodon lives from 23 to 3.6 million years ago, with a dashed extension to 2.6 million years ago because sources differ, and a marker for the Panama nursery about 10 million years ago.
Our own drawing - Two shark outlines of the same length. The top one is bulky and deep-bodied like a great white, the old way megalodon was drawn. The lower one is slimmer, with a longer body and long pectoral fins, the shape newer studies suggest.
Our own drawing - Four boxes around a megalodon outline, each a pressure that may have helped it die out: a cooling planet with falling sea temperatures; prey dying out or moving to cooler water; shallow coastal nursery waters lost as sea level fell; and competition with the great white shark for food.
Our own drawing - A bar chart of bite force in newtons. A human, about 1,317 newtons, is a tiny bar. A great white, about 18,216 newtons, is a short bar. Megalodon, estimated at 108,514 to 182,201 newtons, is a long bar with a lighter section showing the range.
Our own drawing
The drawings are simplified teaching drawings made from the sourced figures on this site. The size and tooth drawings are to scale; the others are not. Useless the eraser is the network’s own mascot. Fonts: Bricolage Grotesque, Newsreader and Kalam (SIL Open Font Licence), served from this site.