Time to disassemble this "mind numbing garbage", Here we go:
-http://www.kronosrising.com/megalodon-historys-mightiest-scavenger/
Claim 1: Adult Megalodon teeth have relatively small serrations and chisel like teeth that were blunt and were made to puncture through bones of rotting whale carcasses, not for ripping out flesh from live prey.
Science Says: As an animal grows proportionally larger and upscaled, its teeth need to become proportionately larger and bulkier as well. If Megalodon had thin teeth to bite off flesh or bone from a huge prey item, they would simply shatter off with ease. The Megalodon seems to have small serrations for its size, but their serrations do not grow proportionately with the teeth . This is because if serrations get any larger, they will be less effective at cutting through meat than a finer serration. Also, Max seems to forget that Megalodon teeth still sometimes retain sharpness after fossilization if their serrations aren’t eroded away. They have been known to cut skin on people's hands, even if they slightly mishandle it. Comparing the Megalodon teeth as chisels is completely stupid, and great white teeth to steak knives as they have very similar sized serrations and when expanded, and are a pretty similar shape and width.
Claim 2: Adult Megalodon had bountiful whales in the past to sustain itself as a scavenger.
Science Says: Megalodons being regionally endothermic, endothermic, and weighing over 50-100 tonnes when fully grown has been estimated by scientists to require at least 1 tonne of flesh a day to sustain itself! This is an absolutely massive requirement that demands LOTS of dead prey flesh. Also, to have a sustainable population you need a population in the thousands. At least half of those would be adults, and therefore having to have thousands of whales die from natural causes every week or day to sustain creatures like that is basically impossible. There wouldn't be enough dead whales in the world to sustain thousands of adult Megalodons everyday!
Claim 3: Megalodon, like the great white would have been even more clumsy, slow, and not maneuverable. It's cartilage skeleton doesn’t allow it to be an active predator at large sizes. This is shown by Great white juveniles transitioning from fish to marine mammals. Also, great whites cannot go on land for brief periods of time like orcas showing that they have a weak skeleton.
Science Says: Sharks cannot go on land for brief periods of times, not because they have a weak skeleton but rather because: 1: they have no ribs or complex skeletal structure to stop their organs from being crushed on land, 2: they have no flippers, 3: their tail moves from side to side, not up and down like an orca to flop up and down on land. He also has most likely never seen a vertebrae from a Megalodon before, as they are heavily calcified and reinforced like dense bone. Also Megalodon had over 200 vertebrae, making it agile as the shark was able to make tight turns. Great whites make that transition from fish to seals because fish are not sustaining enough and do not have enough calories as fatty sea mammals
Claim 4: Megalodon could only reach 16kmh at top speed, and 3 kmh crushing speed which is too slow to catch whales.
Science Says: Megalodons cruising speed would be at a minimum 18kmh because sharks swim to push oxygen over their gills. Megalodon would actually be forced to go at this speed or else it would risk dying from hypoxia since it needs to swim faster to get more oxygen from the water as it relies on ram ventilation. One study showed that the endothermic Megalodon could reach a top speed of 37 kmh. However when directly scaling up from Megalodon’s cruising speed, it is possible that Megalodon could have a top speed even faster than the great whites 56kmh top speed if it had high amounts of white muscle. Even at the lower and conservative estimate at 37kmh, it could would be faster than bottlenose dolphins, right whales, humpback whales, prehistoric mega sea lions, etc.
Claim: Megalodon only reached 16m and 50 tonnes based on tooth slant height calculations
Science Says: New tooth Width studies, which are far more accurate with the Megalodon species have show that Megalodons could possibly reach 20m+ and 100 tonnes. However, most of the scientific consensus is 18m and 50-60 tonnes
Claim: Megalodon got its part of its diet from scavenging kills of 21m long Livyatans
Science Says: There is no evidence of Livyatan reaching 21m length. Livyatan was smaller than Megalodon, and was not able to tackle prey like blue whales unlike Megalodon as stated by paleontologist zchristian De Muzion. Megalodon probably would if it had the chance as its was a rare chance of free food with little energy wasted.
Claim: As Livyatan died out, Megalodon lost its primary food source from scavenging off of Livyatan kills (lmao!)
Bonus Fact: No scientific paper has stated that Megalodon was an obligate scavenger, neither do any reputable paleontologists believe this. However, it would have opportunistically scavenged (basically eat everything in its path) as it needed it to sustain itself with its huge size.
This myth has been so widely foolishly believed and purported by Max Hawthorne, that an online website for prehistoric animal information, ww.prehistoricwildlife.com had to state on Megalodon’s info page:
“Some people have made claims that C. megalodon was simply too large to hunt and could only have been a scavenger. In the face of overwhelming fossil evidence that shows injuries, not just tooth marks, to many large cetaceans, such a claim is not just considered unlikely but almost impossible. While most sharks, and carnivorous animals in general, will take the opportunity to feed from a carcass, doing so does not make them exclusive scavengers. Also marine animals that live by just scavenging tend to be bottom feeders that wait for dead animals to sink to the bottom of the sea. Estimating the size of C. megalodon has also brought estimates of how much food it would take to keep it going. Amounts vary greatly but range between 600 to 1200kg of food every day. This is a tremendous amount of food for a scavenger as scavengers tend to be adapted to require very little energy expenditure because they don't know when or where their next meal is coming from. When taking all of the fossil evidence, biometric models and knowledge about shark lifestyles and biology into account, the result is that scavenger is the least likely method of survival for C. megalodon.”
Scavengers tend to be bottom feeders. This means that a hypothetical scavenger Megalodon would have its dorsal fins pushed more back and would have a large upper lobe tail compared to its bottom like a sand tiger and would be acceleration body based. However as stated by one paleontologist, the Megalodon’s tail had to be equal and all whale sized animals have more cruising bodies like a great white or blue whale or the hydrodynamic flow would be too limiting. This cruising body suggests an active lifestyle within animals.
Also, this image perfectly sums up the stupidity of extremely large carnivorous animals that are obligate scavengers.
I also asked the artist about scavenging Megalodons to which he replied
“ ‘Scavenger Megalodon’.
My answer = hell no!
To be fair, there is a theory that elderly Megalodons lean more towards scavenging than younger ones as apparently larger fish have less-efficient gills for their size, so they aren't as quick or energetic for their size as smaller ones.
BUT, I have doubts this would be a big enough impediment to stop it hunting, as mackerel sharks have simple, strong tails and huge tailfins so the energy>propulsion payoff should be sufficient enough to compensate. And it wouldn't even be the first type of mackerel shark to have an enlarged tailfin, though this would suggest Ovleg's study is partially an underestimate, where size = formula + extra-long tailfin. Also, this theory partly explains the absence of whale-sized fish throughout most of history, though a few exceptionally large Leedsichthys and Whale Sharks may prove there could be ways around this rule.
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But putting this aside, there are just so many other reasons why this would be false.
1-
There's simply no such thing as a large carnivore that is entirely dependent on scavenging as far as we know. The largest modern-day "obligate scavengers" are a handful of vulture species with a very special wing adaptation, or pandas, which hardly eat meat at all. Many super-large prehistoric predators have been proven hunters too.
So-called scavengers like brown bears and spotted hyena are in fact, hyper-efficient hunters and killers. They can literally chase down and overpower their own prey with no outside help. All of the sharks spotted scavenging dead whales are perfectly capable of killing other marine life by themselves (Great Whites, for one).
This very artwork mocks the idea of Obligate scavenging. It is not even a safe niche for a mega-carnivore as you need a LOT of food, yet you are completely dependent on something else to kill your 'prey' for you- meaning you are a less efficient killer than old age, or another animal that is, by definition, more dangerous than you, yet somehow isn't able to harm you.
2-
Megalodon started off as a much smaller predator (maybe 1.5x larger than an Orca), and couldn't possibly have been bound by such limitations a "large" one, based on gill-size-efficiency. From there, it grew to similarly massive sizes as Livyatan and Basilosaurus; otherwise unprecedented in the history of the world for any predator. If it was simply a matter of scavenging, none of these animals would be unique in their size- it would be common among all of history. Instead, it suggests these animals being large ONLY during the age of massive whales because they preyed on massive whales. Meaning a Megalodon simply has to be faster than a whale smaller than itself (Mackerel sharks usually are, which is quite an amazing thing when you think about it). That said, your endothermy study gives food for thought too....” -HarrytheFox
Conclusion: Megalodon was mainly an opportunistic predator, and scavenged on whatever it could come by to get its daily 0.5-1 tonne of flesh a day daily limit. It used its triangular serrated teeth to slice through live whales and flesh possibly many times bigger than it was. However the largest Megalodons were somewhat slower, but still not obligate scavengers.
