Figure 1 – “Megalodon shark jaws museum of natural history 068” by Original uploader was Spotty11222 at en.wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:FunkMonk using CommonsHelper.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia.

Increasingly summers on the East Coast of the United States have become shark fests. There are an impressive number of great whites this year off the coast of Chatham, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.  These have followed the harbor seals and the warm waters to our beaches. At the same time the news media has fairly regularly taken a break from following the antics of showman and bully-in-chief Donald Trump and his run for the White House with shark stories. But this morning I just could not resist passing one on. The video was filmed last year during the shooting of a Discovery Channel documentary. It shows an encounter with “Deep Blue” one of the largest great whites ever recorded. While these fish average about 15 feet in length, Deep Blue approaches twenty-two feet. In the startling video the shark approaches a shark cage off Guadalupe Island, which is off Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. Researcher Mauricio Hoyos Padilla can be seen exiting the cage and pushing the shark away.

Anyone who has seen the movie Deep Blue Sea will be sobered by the sight of Deep Blue. However, this is nothing compared to Carcharocles megalodon which was 14 to 20 meters in length and ruled the Earth’s seas 15.9 to 2.6 Myrs ago. As a child I spent many happy hours at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City with my father and sister. One of my favorite specimens there is shown in Figure 1, a fossilized jaw of C. Megalodon and big enough for a man to sit in. Stay out of the water, people!