When you go to the dentist and they’re working in there, that’s why they have the sucky thing. Whitenack, however, saw another problem with that scenario: “Think about humans: we can’t swallow very well with our mouths open, right? Try it. So if you ramp up the length of the shark and its jaw size, it’s conceivable. So we know that they were strong, and just based on their size, they’re gonna have a pretty hefty bite - definitely bigger than anything we have now force-wise.”Īs for whether Meg could have cleanly devoured that cage? Ehret says a real megalodon’s jaws would’ve been six feet across, capable of swallowing a person without taking a bite. There are all sorts of whale fossils that have bite marks that had to be from something large, like a megalodon. If they hit in the exact right spot, right between two vertebrae, then they might be able to, but that’s like a one in a million shot,” Whitenack says. “A very, very small whale, like a dolphin or something like that, sure. The experts say: They’re skeptical about the Meg biting a whale in half, even with the Meg’s bite force estimated to be between 24,000 to 40,000 pounds per square inch. The movie says: Megalodons had jaws strong enough to bite a whale in half, and could potentially swallow an unbreakable polycarbonate dive cage whole (with a person, Li Bingbing’s marine biologist Suyin, inside it). (Also: she’d like to know why Statham’s heroic Jonas Taylor didn’t don flippers when he swam out to put a tracking tag on the first Meg: “I leaned over to my husband and I was like, ‘Where are his fins?’ Like, just get in there barefoot?”) “Unless it was swimming at a tilt, with just its head and part of its back up, which doesn’t really work for speed,” she says. “They made them flutter very prettily - that’s actually what made me notice, ‘What’s going on with this? Oh, God! No!’ That bothered me the whole time.”Īlso distracting to her: If we see the shark’s dorsal fin and back as it chases humans at the surface of the water, we should also be able to view the tip of its caudal fin (read: tail). So sixgills have six, sevengills have seven, and everyone else has five, including all the sharks in the same order that megalodon was in,” she says. “Every living shark, except for a handful of species, have five gill slits. Whitenack does applaud the visual effects team for the shark’s dorsal fin, which has a ragged edge: “They got reality points for that over the megalodon documentary on Discovery Channel.” But she noticed the effects team gave the Meg eight gill slits when it should have had five. How Realistic Are Shark Attacks in Movies? Ehret posits a range of 50 to 55 feet: “There are some extremely large megalodon teeth, a few that would show that they might have been bigger than that, but certainly not 90 feet,” he says. Based on what we know about the ratio of tooth size to body length in modern great whites, the megalodon is estimated to have been around 60 feet long, according to Whitenack. The experts say: The size is exaggerated. The movie says: Megalodons were 70 to 90 feet long. work on megalodon and fossil great white sharks and Lisa Whitenack, a biology professor at Allegheny College, whose research includes the biomechanics, evolution, and paleobiology of sharks (and who dressed as Sharknado last year for Halloween). ![]() ![]() To fact-check the feasibility of the film’s plot and portrayal of megalodons, we spoke with two Meg experts who helped the Discovery Channel critique its own infamous 2013 “documentary” Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives: Dana Ehret, assistant curator of natural history at the New Jersey State Museum, who did his Ph.D. But nobody will be shocked to learn that the movie - a dream matchup between Jason Statham and a megalodon, the largest shark that ever lived - takes certain liberties when it comes to science. The Meg may have surprised us all with its weekend box-office haul (with an estimated $44.5 million, it’s Warner Bros.’ top opening of 2018, besting Ready Player One and Ocean’s 8).
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