Why Megalodon Went Extinct

Megalodon was the largest predatory shark that ever lived, about 50 feet long, with teeth the size of your hand. For roughly 20 million years nothing could hunt a full-grown one. Then, around 3.6 million years ago, it was gone. There was no asteroid and no bigger monster. The shark that took over the ocean was a third of its size and never beat megalodon in a fight. So how does the strongest predator in the sea lose to something weaker? The story starts with two wrong guesses: that something killed it, and that it was just a giant great white. It was neither. It belonged to a different family, and the great whites that arrived were rivals, not relatives. From there we look at what a body this big costs. It needed around 100,000 calories a day and sat at the thinnest point of the food chain. It also bred slowly and ran warm at about 81 degrees Fahrenheit, which made it a brutal whale hunter. Then the ocean cooled, the shallow nurseries shrank and its favourite whales disappeared. This video follows how that chain of small changes left the biggest shark in history with nothing to eat.