With a length equivalent to that of a five-story building, a fearsome set of teeth made up of nearly three hundred teeth, and a bite force ten times greater than that of the great white shark, the megalodon had no competition in the oceans of the Miocene. But its superiority did not always translate into victory as a predator. Great white sharks—the living animal to which the megalodon is most compared—occasionally lose their prey. And the same may have happened to the extinct giant. At least, that is the explanation for some extraordinary fossils: two whale vertebrae and a megalodon tooth, dating back 15 million years, found in the cliffs of Calvert, Maryland (USA) and studied by researchers from the Calvert Marine Museum (CMM) and the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT). As explained in the journal 'Palaeontologia Electronica', the whale, about 4 meters long, may have been attacked by the megalodon. "The attack bent the whale's spine so much that it basically broke its back," Stephen J. Godfrey, curator of paleontology at Calvert, told this newspaper. However, the victim somehow managed to shake off the assault and survived for another two months. Related News Standard No New reconstruction of the deadly megalodon: It could eat orcas whole ABC Science Standard No Dolphins form the most extensive alliance networks after humans J. de Jorge One of the vertebrae preserves evidence of a major compression fracture. For this type of injury to occur, the whale's vertebrae would have had to have bent very forcefully in such a tight curve that the pressure from the adjacent front vertebra crushed the other. This would have been a terribly painful injury for the whale. CT scans of the fossils show how the vertebra broke. The lower front end broke off and telescoped into the unbroken lower part. Attack from below The discovery of a single megatooth shark ( Otodus megalodon ) tooth next to the vertebrae led researchers to blame it for the attack. The tooth was not embedded in the vertebrae, nor do they bear bite marks, but other fossil finds show that this giant successfully fed on both whales and dolphins. One of the two whale vertebrae. The underside is badly broken, something that happened while the animal was alive Calvert Marine Museum “Living great white sharks often ambush their prey by attacking from below, so it’s possible that megalodon did the same. However, we don’t know for sure whether the attack came from below, from the back, or even if there was a megaattack, although that is our preferred interpretation of the pathologies preserved in these two small whale vertebrae,” Godfrey notes. Whale spasms Scientists acknowledge that this is circumstantial evidence. Other, albeit smaller, macropredators also inhabited the area, including the sharks Parotodus benedenii and one of the ancestors of the living great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias . The possibility that the injury was caused by an attack by a Miocene macroraptorial sperm whale cannot be ruled out. Equally, the authors considered that the fractures were caused by seizures or spasms. Domoic acid poisoning from harmful algal blooms is known to cause seizures in whales and is implicated in the death of newborn baleen whales. It is unlikely, but possible, that a large whale could be affected by this poisoning to the point of suffering a seizure that causes a spinal fracture. Similarly, protozoan infections cause seizures in toothed and baleen whales, although physical diagnosis of this is impossible in a fossil. Great suffering. What seems clear is that the whale suffered greatly. The severity of the traumatic injury is on par with those seen in modern whales that have suffered human-induced trauma, such as blunt force injuries to the skull and vertebrae from ship strikes. But compression fractures like the one seen in the fossil whale have not yet been reported in living specimens. The megalodon tooth Calvert Marine Museum Despite the whale's gruesome encounter with the megalodon, the cetacean survived for about two months, something scientists know from how the wounds began to heal on their own. "The whale didn't live long after the trauma because there are large areas where new bone growth should have occurred, but it didn't. So it died despite its valiant attempt to fully heal. We don't know what ended its life: infection, starvation, another predatory attack..." says the researcher. It didn't last long, but not just anyone can boast of surviving an attack by the largest shark of all time.
