Why We Only Have Megalodon’s Teeth

The biggest shark that ever lived left behind teeth, a few backbones, and almost nothing else.

From Deadliest Extinct Animals, a bold and easy coloring book by Pencil Box Press.

Megalodon is one of the most famous prehistoric animals on Earth. It stars in movies, documentaries and a lot of kids’ nightmares. But nobody has ever found a megalodon skeleton, and nobody ever will.

A skeleton made to disappear

Sharks don’t have bony skeletons like we do. Their skeletons are made mostly of cartilage, the same flexible material in your nose and ears, and cartilage rarely survives long enough to fossilize. So when a megalodon died, most of its body was simply gone.

What did survive were its teeth and some of its vertebrae, the disc-shaped pieces of its backbone. Those are the main fossils scientists have to work with.

Why there are so many teeth

Shark teeth are some of the most common vertebrate fossils on Earth, because sharks shed and replace their teeth constantly. A single shark can go through thousands in a lifetime. That steady supply of teeth is how we know megalodon existed at all, and why people still find its teeth on beaches and riverbeds today.

A shape that keeps changing

Because scientists have to work out the rest of the body from teeth and vertebrae, the picture of megalodon keeps shifting. Older reconstructions made it look like a giant great white. Recent studies argue it may have had a longer, slimmer body than that. Every new fossil find has a chance to change the drawing again.

Have you ever found a shark tooth?

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Megalodon is one of the 40 prehistoric animals in Deadliest Extinct Animals, a bold and easy coloring book from Pencil Box Press.