BRETT TAYLOR

Carcharocles megalodon (or, more recently, Otodus megalodon) was a carnivorous shark that made today’s largest great whites look puny. The notion that the mighty megalodon shark might be alive today is a popular one, as shown by the success of the 2018 movie The Meg and its recent sequel, Meg 2: The Trench. This idea might make for good entertainment, but should we take it seriously? After all, the fossil evidence suggests megalodon went extinct more than two million years ago.

The Meg movies are based on the work of author Steve Alten, who was criticized by Forbes writer Priya Shulka for using “every opportunity to espouse his non-expert beliefs that the Megalodon may still exist,” “re-popularizing conspiracy theories about undiscovered Megalodon populations,” and “other falsehoods about the extinct predator” (Shulka 2018).

Until the 1970s, the modern megalodon myth was little explored. Carharadon megalodon, as it used to be called, was little known to the general public. The notion lurked occasionally in the province of “fish stories” and sailor yarns. Author and champion fisherman Zane Grey claimed to have seen an extraordinary sight while fishing in New Zealand in 1927, but the story only became widely known in 1976. Grey supposedly motioned f rantically for one of his shipmates to photograph the beast, but strangely no photograph seems to have been taken. He at first thought the creature, which a comrade estimated at forty feet long, was a whale shark, but the locals convinced him that the fish he’d seen was “one of the man-eating monsters of the South Pacific.”

But Grey also admitted to “absolutely” believing in the existence of sea serpents. It’s no surprise that the author’s son, Loren, would be skeptical, especially when Zane told Loren that “all fishermen were prone to exaggerate and he was no exception.” But Loren later had to “eat crow” upon traveling with his father to the Tuamotu atolls near Tahiti in 1933. Loren spied a shape in the ocean of a “majestically yellow” color and a head at least ten feet in length. As the shape came closer, Loren was convinced this was either the same shark his father had seen six years before or one like it. He estimated the yellow fish, which was covered on its back with barnacles, was up to fifty feet long. Grey’s account suggests the shark was a relative of the sand shark and the black-tipped shark, but given his description, the most likely explanation is that the creature was a misidentified whale shark (Grey 1976). Grey discounted the possibility that the creature was a whale shark because of the shape of its head and its unusual color, but the coloration of the whale shark’s spots is not always the same. Whale sharks have spots that are usually described as white or creamy, but these spots can look yellowish at times.