Updated June 4, 2026 at 1:18 PM EDT
To mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, we鈥檙e cataloging that define the country鈥檚 history.
The megalodon was one of the biggest fish that ever lived, with seven-inch-long teeth and jaws with 40,000 pounds of bite force. Crocodiles have the strongest bite today, with about 36,000 pounds less than that of megalodon.
But don鈥檛 worry: The megalodon swam between 3.6 and 23 million years ago. But you can still see a model hanging from the ceiling in the Smithsonian Institution鈥檚 National Museum of Natural History.
Curator explains why Americans remain fascinated with megalodons.
What did the megalodon eat?
鈥淚t ate whatever it wanted. I think that鈥檚 a fair thing to say when you鈥檙e a shark the size of a city bus with teeth the size of your hand and really 鈥� from the best we can tell 鈥� a never-ending appetite. It鈥檚 hard not to be impressed by the scale of this superlative shark.鈥�
There are conspiracy theories that the megalodon is still out there. Could they be true?
鈥淚f it wasn鈥檛 extinct, we would know about it by now. Just take a look at its mouth. If a shark that big was still alive, we would see a lot of either direct or incidental evidence for a shark that large. So you would see whales stranded, missing parts of their body. I think saying that it鈥檚 not extinct is a hopeful thing, but it really doesn鈥檛 align with reality.鈥�
What teeth did you use in the model?
鈥淲hen you see a model of megalodon, you鈥檙e actually looking at a reconstruction, a best guess, based on the fossil record of this very extinct shark. And it鈥檚 worth taking a step back. Sharks are cartilaginous fishes. And what I mean by that is most of their body is made up of cartilage, and they don鈥檛 have the same kind of bones that humans have in our bodies. And so what we find is that fossils of megalodon are just teeth and parts of the backbone. They don鈥檛 have ribs. They don鈥檛 have flippers with bones.
鈥淎nd the other feature that we know about sharks is that they replace their teeth throughout their life. So one single shark will probably spit out hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of teeth throughout its life, and that really increases the chances of us finding those individual hard part remains. It is rare, but people have found entire articulated jaws together with those teeth, and paleontologists think of those really rare finds as Rosetta Stones. All of a sudden, you can find all the individual teeth and their variation throughout the jaws. But for the most part, we just get these spectacular individual teeth. There are probably millions represented in the world鈥檚 collections.鈥�
How does the megalodon model help tell the story of America?
鈥淟ooking at megalodon for me is about superlatives. It tells us something about the past that is totally unlike the world today, and there鈥檚 also the sense of awe. It takes us out of our daily life for just a moment and reminds us that this, too, is part of the American story.
鈥淭oday, we have all these big challenges about climate change and biodiversity loss, and there are future scenarios that do have their analogs in the deep past. And the hope is that this information is useful and actually guides our decision-making about what to do. And being a paleontologist is like looking at ancient worlds that seem like they鈥檙e so different from today that they could be different planets, but it isn鈥檛. It鈥檚 our planet, just at a very different time with very different conditions.鈥�
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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produced and edited this interview for broadcast with . Walkey also produced it for the web.
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