You all keep reffering to the megalodon as like a giant 50 ft great white, an ancestor of the great white and as the "carcharodon" megalodon in your arguments. However you all keep forgetting that from scientific research it was actually changed to "carcharocles" megalodon which is not related to the great white, both are evolved out of seperate lineages and evidence suggests megalodon was much more like say, a giant blue shark and great whites were at most a distant cousin which actually evolved from " Isurus hastalis, the "broad tooth mako". "Around 1995, a new genus, Carcharocles, was proposed to classify megalodon. Paleontologists are now favouring Carcharocles for the shark

Now im not saying your wrong or anything and you can disagree all you want but before you keep dully reffering to it as carcharodon bloody megalodon all the time, at least read this article and decide for yourself>

http://www.elasmo-research.org/education/e...archarocles.htm

If you decide to believe it is still carcharodon then thats cool, but please read up on it first to get an opinion rather than keep referring to it by its dated name which is likely to be wrong.

Thanks

Thats the trouble with elasmobranchs, they don't fossilise well due to cartilage instead of bone. A complete skeleton (or something more than just teeth) would have given us a greater idea about what C. megalodon (I'm safe with that one) was like.
However one things for sure, if it is a Lamniform or a Carcharhiniform, both groups are shallow water shark (or surface open water, though this is rarer). Pretty much ruling out it's chance of still being alive

yup,sadly yes

Too bad that won't stop the "hardcores" from still believing in there(Megs) continued existence, damn that pesky scientific confirmation*throws his hands up to the heavens*.

Quite frankly I'm not incredibly fussed about its classification, as long as it remains good to read about.

which is fair enough

Carcharocles is much older than 1995. I think it was first proposed in the 1960's.

Some suggest it looked more like a gigantic sandtiger shark (aka Grey nurse shark) with broad triangular teeth.

thats very interesting

Thanks, McBrain, for clarifying things. Either way, a 50-foot predatory shark would be quite a find, if it in fact lived in our modern world.

Looking like the sand tiger would be a giant leap though, just from its teeth. Mainly because they look nothing like sand tiger teeth.

⁽²⁾ There is a fair amount of controversy over the phylogeny of C. megalodon . Some researchers think it is related to the white shark and therefore deserves to be placed in the genus Carcharodon. Others subscribe to the theory that C. megalodon is only a distant relative of the white shark, and that it should be given its own genus, Carcharocles, and placed in a separate lineage that gave way to the modern day odontaspidid sand tiger sharks (Cappetta 1987). (If the latter theory is true, than C. megalodon may not have looked much like the white shark, but possibly more like an oversized sand tiger shark with much larger and broader teeth [Richard Martin in prep.].) For the sake of stability, the more popularly used genus, Carcharodon, is used in this discussion. It should be noted, however, that in the paleontological literature, Carcharocles is presently the favoured genus for C. megalodon (Richard Martin pers. comm.). For more details on the Carcharodon vs. Carcharocles debate, see various papers in Klimley and Ainley (1996) and paleoichthyologist Jim Bourdon’s web site at http://www.elasmo.com/

(Source)

thanks for clearing that up

I think people to group them together cause when we think of a huge shark that eats alot the great white come's to mind....It's just a easier to compare them i think.......

Technically speaking, your right. But many people use generic terms for classification purposes. For instance, "ghost", which could be a "spirit, poltergeist" ect. to some, while to others they are all completely different. It all depends on ones level of knowledge.

Like Mattshark said, the teeth of the Megalodon resemble those of the Carcharodon family.

Meg Tooth


Great White Tooth


Sand Tiger Tooth


And the only fossil evidence we have of Megalodon are it's jaws and teeth.