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You think you know sharks? Well, consider the Megalodon. An unrivalled force of the sea, an Apex predator, a beast at the top of the food chain, an unstoppable shark and one of nature's oldest killing machines…

Now, some sharks live off plankton, some are designed for speed whilst some are built for scavenging and others still are created for gently roaming the deep sea. Megalodon was built for one purpose – to kill.

Carcharocles Megalodon (Meg) was quite simply the biggest, predatory shark that ever lived on this planet. It first appeared in the oceans about 20 million years ago during the Miocene & Pliocene Epochs (Cenozoic Era), before it disappeared around 1-2 million years ago. I use the word “disappeared” as there are some people that believe Megalodon to still be alive today. Although this fact has not yet been proved or disproved, there are compelling arguments for both sides of the debate.

With a jaw size measuring 9ft high by 11ft wide, there was nothing that Megalodon could not eat. A typical Megalodon diet would include fish, seals, other sharks and even whales if the occasion presented itself. It has been calculated that a typical adult Megalodon would have been approximately 3-4 times the size of a modern day Great White shark (that’s approximately 55-65 ft). It would have weighed around 65 tons and would have teeth between 5-6 inches long, although there have been teeth discovered that are in excess of 7.5 inches.

Over two thirds of our planet is covered by water. At the deepest point - "Challenger Deep", the sea bed lies at 35,813 feet or 10,915 meters (7 miles / 11km), this is located at the bottom of the Marianas Trench in the South Pacific Ocean. There are many places that humans have not yet explored on this planet and it’s fair to say that the majority of these locations are under the sea. So is it really all that strange to come to the possibility that there could very well be a large shark swimming about in the sea somewhere that we haven’t yet discovered?

But why has no-one ever come across a Megalodon if they do still exist? Surely we would have encountered one by now if they were still out there? Well no… There are many large creatures out there that we, as humans, would never have come across if it had not been for a few isolated instances.

Possibly the most famous example would be the Mega-mouth Shark; a large shark that was only discovered in 1976, when an American ship accidentally caught one in a large net that was designed to collect old shells and missile casing from the ocean floor. Another example would be the Giant Squid; Scientists know of this amazing creature’s existence, but apart from a few dead bodies being washed to shore and the occasional tentacle from a Giant Squid being found in a shark’s stomach, no human has ever seen one of these gigantic creatures. Then again, consider the Coelacanth, a creature that was believed to be extinct for over 60 million years, before suddenly being discovered alive and well. So is it really that absurd to think that a shark could be doing the same over a 2 million year period?

So it’s not uncommon for large animals on this planet to go ‘unnoticed’ from mankind when they are alive and flourishing. But what about when a Megalodon dies? Surely, just like the Giant Squid, we would find a carcass washed ashore, or find parts of a Megalodon in another shark’s digestive system? Well again, no… Sharks sink when they die, they don’t float to the surface like other marine life. So the chances of a dead Megalodon being washed ashore are next to impossible. Even the possibility of another smaller breed of shark tearing chunks out of a dead Megalodon for a meal only to be caught by humans, is in itself a very small possibility as there are very few species that can actually withstand the different extremes offered by both the deep sea and the surface water. Even if this did event did occur and we did find tore pieces of Megalodon flesh inside the smaller shark, we would probably not even realise what we had found as we have nothing to compare it to (Having never seen a Megalodon before).

Then what about skeletons lying around in the ocean? Surely if a 65 ton Megalodon shark was roaming our waters, Divers and other underwater parties would have happened upon such a sea treasure by now? Well, no… Sharks don’t have bones. Instead they have cartilage which does not fossilize, instead it disintegrates relatively quickly and the whole shark will basically vanish with the exception of the jaws and the teeth. There have been a few rare cases whereby some vertebras from the Megalodon’s spinal column have been found, but they tell us very little about how these magnificent creatures lived, fed, mated, hunted, etc. Almost everything we know about Megalodon comes from its teeth that we find at the bottom of rivers, costal waters and deep ocean beds.

Whenever a shark is feeding and it looses a tooth, another tooth immediately takes its place. Because of this process, some modern day sharks can expect to get through about 20,000 teeth in their lifetime.

Consider all the hundreds of different species of shark that have lived in the seas over the last 450 million years, and then consider all the teeth they would have lost during that time. You can now begin to understand why shark teeth are the most common fossils on the planet.

Ok, we've already established that shark teeth are the most common fossilized vertebrae in the world. But exactly what can a load of old teeth tell us about an animal? They can tell us much more than you may imagine.

Teeth can tell us what the shark ate, how it attacked it's prey, the most probable size and weight of the shark, how robust the shark would have been, which stage of it's life it was in when the tooth was lost, the location upon where the shark lost it's tooth, the different tactics the shark would have employed to be a successful predator, etc. the list goes on and on.

As mentioned earlier, shark cartilage does not fossilize very well, most shark skeletons rot and leave nothing behind, Megalodon is no different. On very rare occasions, a Megalodon vertebra from the spinal column has been found. But the most complete spinal column for a Megalodon to be found was in Belgium in the 1860's. Measuring 6 inches wide and almost 30 feet long, the spinal column was composed of 150 vertebras and was found just outside the city of Antwerp.

So, as you can imagine, almost everything that we know about Megalodons comes from our studies on their teeth. let's look at a Megalodon tooth and see what stories it has to tell.

Here we have a typical Megalodon tooth. This particular one is from my own private collection. This tooth weighs 6.2 oz (177g), is 4.7 inches long (120mm) and is 3.3 inches wide (83mm). It's around 12 million years old and comes from South Carolina, USA.

The picture above clearly shows the display side of the tooth. This is known as the "Lingual" side of the tooth. You would be forgiven for thinking that this was actually the front of the sharks tooth. It's not... Although this is the curved side of the tooth, it's also the side that would be viewed if you were being eaten alive, inside the Megalodon's mouth whilst looking out.

The front of the tooth is known as the "Labial" side and can been seen in the image below. This is the side of the tooth that is normally flat and which be viewed if you were standing in front of the Megalodon and looking into it's mouth.

True stories? Well as true as true can be without any hard evidence to back them up. The stories shown on this page come from all over the world and from loads of different sources. I personally don't believe any of them to be a lie - the person that has told the story, genuinely believes in what they have seen. If their story is actually a true Megalodon sighting or not, is another argument. You decide...

In the year 1918 there had been a sensation that ocurred among the "outside" crayfish men at Port Stephens, when, for several days, they refused to go to sea to their regular fishing grounds in the vicinity of Broughton Island. The men had been at work on the fishing grounds--which lie in deep water--when an immense shark of almost unbelievable proportions put in an appearance, lifting pot after pot containing many crayfishes, and taking, as the men said, "pots, mooring lines and all." These crayfish pots, it should be mentioned, were about 3 feet 6 inches in diameter and frequently contained from two to three dozen good-sized crayfish each weighing several pounds. The men were all unanimous that this shark was something the like of which they had never dreamed of. Later on, many of the men were questioned very closely and they all agreed as to the gigantic stature of the beast. But the lengths they gave were, on the whole, absurd. This is mentioned, however, as an indication of the state of mind which this unusual giant had thrown them into. And bear in mind that these were men who were used to the sea and all sorts of weather, and all sorts of sharks as well. One of the crew said the shark was "three hundred feet long at least"! Others said it was as long as the wharf on which we stood--about 115 feet! They affirmed that the water "boiled" over a large space when the fish swam past. They were all familiar with whales, which they had often seen passing at sea, but this was a vast shark. They had seen its terrible head which was "at least as long as the roof on the wharf shed at Nelson's Bay." Impossible, of course! But these were prosaic and rather stolid men, not given to 'fish stories' nor even to talking about their catches.

The deepest portion of the Pacific Ocean, the Challenger Deep, is located in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific.

Recently, Japanese researchers have conducted an interesting experiment in the Suruga Bay, not far from the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the World Ocean. Basically, the researchers put a container with some smelly bait on the bay bottom. A special video camera was attached to the wall of the container. The researchers peered into monitors to see what would happen with the container and the bait.

The smell of the bait attracted a shoal of deep-water sharks. But then the researchers saw something incredible that left them speechless. Suddenly the sharks scattered in all directions and researchers saw an incredibly huge monster on the screens of their monitors. The giant slowly soared before the video camera at a depth of about 1.5 kilometers. The length of the sea Goliath was over 60 meters (more than 180 feet). It was not clear what the giant was in fact.

Researchers failed to answer the question, just made conjectures concerning what the creature may be. They said that might be a sleeping shark, the largest shark . Even now people know just few facts about these sharks as they have been hiding in the dark ocean deeps for millions of years. People have never seen live sleeping sharks as well as giant squids. Only once, in 1964, a bulk of a dead sleeping shark was cast ashore in Indonesia; it was just a very young shark judging by its size of 26 meters.

"Scientists still do not know what they saw, registered and filmed and not a single frame has been released. If it was a giant shark Megalodon is a good candidate, even though this monster is thought to have died out around 2 million years ago.

New Scientist Magazine: June 13, 2002...

LONDON, England -- Scientists have revealed a mysterious recording that they say could be the sound of a giant beast lurking in the depths of the ocean.

Researchers have nicknamed the strange unidentified sound picked up by undersea microphones "Bloop". While it bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals, it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth, Britain's New Scientist reported. It is too big for a whale and one theory is that it is a deep sea monster, possibly a many-tentacled giant squid.

In 1997, Bloop was detected by U.S. Navy "spy" sensors 3,000 miles apart that had been put there to detect the movement of Soviet submarines, the magazine reports. The frequency of the sound meant it had to be much louder than any recognised animal noise, including that produced by the largest whales.

So is it a huge octopus? Although dead giant squid have been washed up on beaches, and tell-tale sucker marks have been seen on whales, there has never been a confirmed sighting of one of the elusive cephalopods in the wild. The largest dead squid on record measured about 60ft including the length of its tentacles, but no one knows how big the creatures might grow.

For years sailors have told tales of monsters of the deep including the huge, many-tentacled kraken that could reach as high as a ship's mainmast and sink the biggest ships. However Phil Lobel, a marine biologist at Boston University, Massachusetts, doubts that giant squid are the source of Bloop.

"Cephalopods have no gas-filled sac, so they have no way to make that type of noise," he said. "Though you can never rule anything out completely, I doubt it."

Scientists from the U.S.'s NOAA have been baffled by the "Bloop" sound Nevertheless he agrees that the sound is most likely to be biological in origin. The system picking up Bloop and other strange noises from the deep is a military relic of the Cold War. In the 1960s the U.S. Navy set up an array of underwater microphones, or hydrophones, around the globe to track Soviet submarines. The network was known as SOSUS, short for Sound Surveillance System. Their listening stations lie hundreds of yards below the ocean surface, at a depth where sound waves become trapped in a layer of water known as the "deep sound channel". Here temperature and pressure cause sound waves to keep travelling without being scattered by the ocean surface or bottom. Most of the sounds detected obviously emanate from whales, ships or earthquakes, but some very low frequency noises have proved baffling.

Scientist Christopher Fox of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Acoustic Monitoring Project at Portland, Oregon, has given the signals names such as Train, Whistle, Slowdown, Upsweep and even Gregorian Chant. He told New Scientist that most can be explained by ocean currents, volcanic activity -- Upsweep was tracked to an undersea South Pacific mountain that had not been identified as "live."

"The sound waves are almost like voice prints. You're able to look at the characteristics of the sound and say: 'There's a blue whale, there's a fin whale, there's a boat, there's a humpback whale and here comes and earchquake," he says. But some sounds remain a mystery he says. Like Bloop -- monster of the deep?

Two-third of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The huge water space is still hiding numerous mysteries from people - we know about ocean a lot less than we do about space. Sea animals strike imagination with their size and power. A 15-meter squid was found on Canadian shores. A trailer took the giant animal to a research center. Scientists measured its tentacles and concluded that it was an absolutely new, previously unknown squid specimen.

Scientists spend millions of dollars to catch or at least to photograph giant deepwater animals. However, expensive expeditions have not brought any results yet. No scientist has seen a giant squid in the ocean. However, fishermen see huge living monsters sometimes. As a rule, their stories are perceived as tales, no one believes drunk fishermen's stories in bars.

A Canadian newspaper published a very interesting story in 1955 as told by a group of fishermen. They said that their ship had come across something strange in the sea. At first they could not understand, whether it was a dead whale or a giant jellyfish. When the ship approached the strange animal, one of the fishermen leant over the board trying to hook the animal up. As soon as the steel hook went into the jelly-like body, a huge tentacle sprang out of it. The fisherman fell down on the deck: his face turned white, he was shaking with convulsions. The fisherman had to stay in bed until the boat arrived at port. The story happened not very far from the location, where the dead body of a giant squid was found on the shore.

Modern science knows practically nothing about giant sea monsters. It is known that they live at the depth of almost 2,000 meters. There is a unique exhibit in an American museum - a squid's eye the size of a soccer ball. Fishermen found the huge eye in the stomach of a sperm-whale. Sperm-whales like eating squids most of all. Usually, they hunt for small animals weighing  four or six-kilos, swallowing a dozen of them at once. If a sperm-whale comes across a giant squid, the two titanic animals fight brutally. Scientists believe, sperm-whale usually wins the battle and eats the defeated rival.

i am a retired Army Sergeant of 22 years of service. While stationed in the country of Panama in 1996, i spent the night on the Atlantic side of the canal near the city of colon. Just a few miles away is the opening to the shagress river, where i decided to do a little night fishing. The water in this location is salt water, then turns brackish when mixed with the fresh water a few miles inland. The sky was a bit cloudy with scattered clouds moving through, however there was a half moon out that night.

While sitting on the small pier and keeping an eye on the tip of my pole for any bites, something caught my attention that was moving above the surface of the water about 250 to 300 feet away. I thought i was seeing things when i focused my eyes on what looked to be something similar to a sail. I remember saying to myself, that person is out of his mind. I thought what i was seeing was one of those surfboards with a sail on it heading up the shagress. I didn't see a person on the board, and figured he probably was standing on the other side of the sail. There was a little wind blowing in from the ocean, but not heavy enough to convince me that this night would be a great time to do some sail surfing. I saw this image for only 5 to 8 seconds before a dark cloud passed under the moon, then it was too dark to see anything. As i sat down i shook my head, wondering if this individual was right in the head being out there this late at night. About two minutes had passed when i heard this tremendous splash in the water just beyond my view. moments later three 1 1/2 foot waves came slapping against the shore line, one behind the other. My first response was, what in the world was that. I continued to try and see as best i could up the river, hoping to catch a view of anything moving. I watched for about a minute, but never spotted anything nor heard anything as well.

Moments later again out of the corner of my eye where i spotted the guy sail surfing, his sail came into view again. This time he was heading toward the open sea, and now i was convinced this guy must of been drunk or was just pure crazy. I watched the shadow of his sail start to get smaller and smaller and then realized it was submerging under the water. Seconds later it was gone, and that's when i realized it wasn't a sail at all. i never felt chills run up my back like i did that evening, i wasn't ready to believe what i just saw or try to imagine what was connected to the huge fin.

The next morning when the sun rosed and it became daylight out, i looked at the very spot where i had this sighting. I watched a few small boats pass through that same exact spot, and tried to figure out just how big this object really was. I am positively convinced that what i saw was a dorsal fin of some kind. This fin must of came close to probably 5 feet in height, and even had me doubting what i saw after estimating it's height. I never heard a large blow of air a whale would make while clearing it's air hole, and i know what a whale sharks dorsal fin looks like because i have been right up on them while fishing in the ocean. This fin i saw resembled what i would have to best describe as a shark's fin. Not a Dolphin, not a whale, not even a killer whale, but exactly like a shark.

I never told anybody about this, simply because i didn't think anybody would believe me. If i would try and describe the splash i heard, well let's try a car being hung 20 feet above the water, then dropped. I never heard such a huge splash like that in my life. I just thought it would be convenient to share this story with you, especially on this web page. Am i nut's? Maybe for spending 22 years in the army, but i know what i saw that night and it was not a whale.

Whether you want to chat to other people about sharks, read more about the Megalodon, brush up on your 'under water' knowledge or perhaps even purchase your very own Megalodon tooth, there's something for everyone. Just take a look at the "Cool Links" page and you'll find loads of excellent and informative sites...