This episode is brought to you by square Space. Start building your website today at square space dot com. Ter offer code stuff at check out to get ten percent off square Space. Set your website apart. Welcome to you Stuff you should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant's Jerry, This Joson John, and this is stuff you should know. Mega Loodon, Burgo Loodon, saxomaphone. Jerry, How where's yours? Nice? Jerry? Yeah, she's trained, well so, Chuck. Yep, you ever seen Mega Ladon? No, no, you haven't neither ye NEI there's any human being because they're extinct, that's right. Um, but they are pretty awesome. And when they were alive, you would not have wanted to see one anyway mm hmm well maybe from sure maybe until they learned to walk. Yeah, and you would have been like, oh, I regret coming to the shore today. Um. Caracodon megaladon, Yeah, I think I don't know if it's a carcrodon. How's that couch adon? Let's a carcrodon carchar I likedon right, that's the official name. Uh. And it was a real thing. It's not made up. Um, No, it is not the invention of a cryptozoologist or a sci fi writer. No, it was a real thing. It was a real thing. And giant, giant shark, I mean so giant. It's it's I don't want to overuse the word my bobbling, so I'm just gonna say incredible, you remarkable. Should we go and just say the size of a school bus? Yeah, I saw size of a greyhound bus. It's about the same size. Well, I guess, yeah, one smells a lot worse than the other. Which one and the greyhound? The school bus just smells like fear and disappointment, and the greyhound bus smells like all that plus days and days of body odor and farts and cigarette butts. Have you ever taken a long bus trip? That's a one from Arizona to Atlanta. It's it's the worst. Yeah, no, one, No. I think I might have talked about this. It didn't dawn on me until like day two. I was like, wait a minute, nobody is able to shower. We're all just getting stinkier. We're all eating garbage food and farting into our cloth seats. It was awful. How long did the trip take. It feels like it was like three days because you know, he's stop like every freaking two hours, you know, because you got account for you know, however many people on there, and it breaks down, didn't break down, and you just had to stop a lot for breaks, and we got stopped in Mississippi for a drug dog to come on. Oh really, did anybody getting in trouble? No, they just randomly stopped for the drop drug dog. And this German shepherd jumped all over the seats and they opened up the baggage underneath and he ran all over the place. So I guess then he went home and took a shower. Yeah, he was like man getting out of there. I guess smuggling drugs on a on a bus is Actually when I thought about it, was like, what a great idea, Yeah, because it's apparently under the radar. Yeah, and um, everybody else's smell is overpowering the smell of the drugs. You'd think they probably were tons of drugs on that bus and the dog was just like I had ten pounds of cocaine and they didn't smell that just kidding, So like you really needed to say just kidding. You never no kids listen to this, Yeah, probably especially this one. We want to say hello to all of the sixth grade classes that are listening to this right now, and we'd also like to say a special hello to our new sponsor, Greyhound Bus Lines. Leave the driving to them, so chuckers. Yes, um, where we are talking about the Megaladon, the biggest shark that ever lived, and it may have had from what I can understand, it makes sense too if you stop and think about it. It may have had the um most devastating as how I've seen it put bite of any animal that ever lived in the history of Earth. Yeah, I would say, I would say that's accurate. It was bigger than t rex. T Rex is very ferocious, had a very ferocious bite ergo ipso fact though it was probably um more ferocious as bite wise than t rex or anything else. Let's talk about it all right before, like years ago, people were dumb and they thought they found these fossils of these humongous six inch teeth, like a tooth itself. It's like larger than a hand, a human hand, like a largish human hand. So so again to put this in perspective, because everybody knows what great white teeth looked like about the size of a shot glass. It's a great white tooth. Okay, so about two inches. Um, these were six so three times larger than a great white tooth. And t Rex is right in the middle at something. Yeah, t Rex is at about four inches. So we're talking a megaladon tooth is fifteen centimeters in length, where great white sharks is about five centimeters. And that's we're a single tooth. I just went tooth, very very large, and I saw that they actually go up to seven inches as far as what they found. So four years ago people found these fossils and they said, oh my god, it's a petified dinosaur tongue, dragon tongue. Oh even better, Well, I have dragon, snakes and dinosaurs down in my research. I saw dragons only I believe in dragons four hundred years ago. Um. And then in sixteen sixty seven, Danish anatomus named Nicholas Stino said, these aren't tongues, their teeth. Don't be stupid, everybody, Yeah, these are gigantic teeth, and everybody's like, don't be ridiculous. They're they're dragon tongues. I'm wearing one around my neck as we speak, and I use it in my potions, along with eye of newt probably, so oh yeah, apparently they did use it in medicine. You find something that big, it's gotta have great powers short when you grind it up and snored it. So they found these teeth over the years, and these these fossils, uh, not only just the teeth, but something called CenTra c E N t R A H. And that is the uh it's not vertebrae, but it's a part of the spine that doesn't deteriorate, right, because here's the problem. A shark skeleton is made up almost entirely of cartilage, So no matter how big it is, over time that cartilage is going to break down and return to the dust on the bottom of the sea floor and you'll never know what was ever there. But luckily those teeth in the center are made of harder stuff and the teeth actually become fossilized. And there's another one of my favorite episodes that just flies under the radar. Fossil fossils was great, and that's an old one. So you remember the fossilization processes where the the individual atoms of this stuff are basically replaced by stone and the thing literally turns to stone. So anything organic and it is replaced by stone and it becomes fossilized in that sense. So that's why something like a tooth could survive. It becomes stone. And apparently the same thing goes with the center. So taking megalodon teeth and mega look at then CenTra. They started making calculations and measurements and figuring out like, oh my god, this thing was enormous. Yeah, and we've mentioned the t rex and dinosaurs a couple of times. They weren't. If you're picturing in your head dinosaurs roaming the earth and the megalodon swimming in the ocean fighting one another. Yeah, they didn't overlap by about forty five million years, so it wasn't even close. Uh. And of course humans we haven't been around that long at all in the Grand scheme, No Homo sapiens maybe a hundred thousand years or so. Yeah, so obviously we were not there during the time of the megalodon either. So our opening bit about standing on the beach watching them is was it was joked it's stanka bs just humor um. So dinosaurs were around from two hundred million years ago, just sixty five million years ago when the big asteroid hit, and then Megalodon was from twenty million years ago to about two million to one and a half million years ago. It seems like, so yeah, absolutely no overlap whatsoever. And I was just helping out a sixth grade class. Just so you mentioned before, these scientists were left with quite a task. It's not like finding of like a dinosaur U dinosaur's bones and saying, well, we can put it together. They didn't have a lot to go on with just the center in the teeth. But they're much smarter than we are, so they were able to do so. Yes, And one of the things that the CenTra actually shows two is growth rings. Right, so just like a tree, sharks actually have a a signature of growth. I guess you'd call it like a tree ring on their center on these kind of vertebrae like structures. They get one every year every season when it changes from I think warm to cold, they get a little growth ring. And so um, if you're an ichthyologist or a paleontologist or a paleoich theologist specifically, Yeah, you could look at one of these things and be like, oh, well, this this megalodon lived to a hundred fifty years old because it's a hundred and fifty rings. Yeah, and apparently, uh, wide light rings means you grew faster as a megalodon and narrow dark rings means you grew a little slower. So they can look at these growth rates in the Age of Death and just understand a little bit more about the Great journey to extinction. So you too will understand a little bit more about the Great Journey to extinction right after these messages, so check. They found teeth, and they found teeth actually all over the world. There's there's a lot. It's an amazing amount of stuff that they were able to glean from just finding some teeth in some CenTra here um. And one of the things that they figured out from the teeth is that, wow, we found teeth all over the world, in Europe, in India and Japan, in North America, South America, Africa, Australia. Basically they've been found around every continent except for Antarctica. And I would guess that if you could dig down through the ice sheets around Antarctica, you would probably find some megalodon teeth, yeah, because it was like very different a million years ago down there. As far as right now, Yeah, you'd like living in South Carolina. Nice coastal beach scene there. Imagine the megalodon swimming around. That's exactly what happened in two thousand nine. Um, some paleontologists from a a university in Florida. I'll just say that they very generous of you. They discovered some uh, some fossils. Uh. And these specifically were interesting because they were all little baby megalodons. It was a nursery. Yeah. And they discovered the same thing off the coast of South Carolina, which if you know how big something is when it dies, and you know how big it is when it's born, just add them together and divide by two and you have a pretty good idea of what it's life was like. Uh. And when they were little babies, they were just twenty long. Yet that cute. They figured out did you say that that nurser was found in Panama for those researchers, Uh, yeah, And then then I think the other one is off South Carolina. So they figured out from these teeth that Um, the megalodon infant was as big as the normal size great white shark adult, like a pretty big great white. Yeah, that's like on the larger side. Yeah, that's amazing. Twenty ft long are the babies. That's like um, baby huey basically, but as a shark. So this means um, clearly, this is the apex predator of its time. Um, and it can. Well, it probably went everywhere because it could, but because nothing threatened it, you could eat. It could eat whatever it wanted to. And all things suggest that they had a lot of whales, balleen whales. They found teeth marks on whale bones. They even found teeth stuck in whale fossils. Oh yeah, pretty exciting. No, what happened there? They were in the middle of the meal when they got wiped out or they lost a tooth and it went down with the whale. Well it said teeth though, like maybe they just lost it, but maybe it was like me and it bit into the chicken bone started dropping teeth. Was that what happened? The chicken bone? The second one, Yeah, broke off at the Falcons game. It didn't hurt, right, You told us about that. It was so weird. I was like, well, my tooth just broken half okay, as long as didn't as long as it didn't hurt. And I went and sat back down to my seat and was just passed out from the pain that suddenly swarmed. No, there was no pain. The only pain was watching the falcons this season. Uh so they weighed between fifty a hundred tons and they could eat up to twenty hundred pounds of food a day. I love this. I love the comparison. I wasn't gonna do it. Okay, we won't go ahead. The author said, that's five hundred more pounds than the average American eats in a year. Just such a dumb comparison. But it's also hilarious in every way. I think good comparisons are one where it really hits home like that doesn't. So the author should have been like, that's fifty big max. Maybe that would have satisfied me times fifty Uh terrible. Um did we say, chuck? How big? The um? The mouth is based on these reconstructions. No, they put you know, how you see the big giant shark mouth. Sometimes it's from a real shark, and sometimes they just put it together. In this case, they put it together. Yeah, but the mouthful feature like real megalodon teeth. But the jaws, the bone jaws or cartlet shaws are obviously resin right. But you'll frequently see somebody standing in one of these and they're just dwarfed by it. And this is pretty accurate. Apparently they had it was reasonable for a megalodon to have a seven foot diameter, which is who knows how many meters to at least in diameter the mouth, and so like I saw this one. I think shark facts or something shark inside or some site was basically like, actually, if megalodon were alive today, you wouldn't have to worry about it because it would be like you eating a cheese it and calling that a meal. They wouldn't even bother with you. I would not gamble that and swim around it, because even if it just opened its mouth, you'd just go right in. Well, we like cheese, it's exactly. Yeah. Uh, and if there's a whole box of humans, that megalodon would probably eat the whole thing, as a box of humans is called the school bus. That's right full circle. Oh my gosh, Chuck, So you talked a little earlier about the bite force. Um, this is a good comparison, I think because it does hit home. Um specialist, specialist. It's a weird thing to say experts. Experts, she means cardiologists. Yeah, experts and researchers say that a megala don's bite force was akin to us eating a grape, them eating a whale skull. So it could chomp through a whale skull the same as we could much do a grape, even those of us with fewer teeth. Yeah, and again it's not just the bite wasn't so bad just because there the teeth are so big and the the mouth was had such a wide diameter. It was designed basically to yeah, to crush, to disabled, to to disfigure in mame and pillage that kind of stuff. That's right. So yeah, it would be able to crush the skull very easily, and it did. Um. As a matter of fact, the podcast art for this episode has a megaladon eating a whale Like it's nothing. Man, it's an artist's rendering. It's not a underwater photograph. But it's pretty cool. Nonetheless, you know, it's also cool is us taking a break? Oh yeah, so let's do that, and we'll come back and we'll finish up on the mighty micheladon Marldon stop. So how are these dudes? Remember one and a half to two million years to twenty million years is when they lived. I'm not sure how long they lived, and I'm not sure that ich theology just to paleoic theologists know yet. Well, I said, they guess they became distinct about two million years ago. No, I mean how long they lived in like the lifespans area, it was pretty big. I don't know. Well, I mean most large like whale, sharks and whales, they have long lives. Listen, one hunts them. But they think they went extinct a couple of million years ago during the Playo placed to scene period. And um, we actually featured an article just a few days ago about a new study on what they think caused the extinction because they used to think it had more to do with climate changes that they couldn't keep up with. Yeah, but um, I believe the same researchers who figured out the um or who found that Panamanian nursery. Um. Also we're the ones who conducted this study. Maybe not, but um, they they showed that the global ocean temperatures rose, was and um declined during this eighteen million year period where the megalodon was around, and they're still Megalodon. Yeah, their populations apparently didn't change. So they've basically said, no, we don't think it was temperature climate change that did it. We think it was a lack of diversity in the prey. Well, yeah, and I guess what you were talking about, like eating a human, Like you know, we'll say a human is six ft tall. That's still pretty large. And if that's not a cheese it, then you need to eat super large things and a lot of them. And you better hope those large things are successful at reproducing as well, because they go away, you're in big trouble. And they basically think that's what happened. The food sources became less diverse, and then smaller predators evolved and started competing and we should probably faster and better at hunting. And what happened by smaller they mean orcas. Yeah, like that's that that was their smaller competition for the same prey. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, and uh, who was it? The Zurix Paleontological Paleontological Institute in Museum they examined two hundred Megalodon records and came up with this new information, and they flat out said, changing climactic conditions do not appear to have had any influence. Yeah, they're like ocean hot, ocean cold. We love it either way. Yeah, And I mean if you if you're competing with an uh an organism or species that is going after the same prey but doesn't need as much as you to eat per day, you're going to lose evolutionarily speaking, that it could very easily be what it is. And because Megalodon, the recreations of them look a lot like um great whites, a lot of people are like, well, they're obviously great white ancestors. Apparently not. Apparently they are more closely related to mako sharks, right, yeah, mako sharks um and poor beagles sharks, although they would share some sort of relation to um Great whites because they would both be lamb uniforms. And the lamb niform is a shark with two dorsal fins, five gill slits in the mouth that extends back beyond the eyes, so they can smile real wide after they eat a whole boat full of people. So I was about to do the Jaws line. Smile you son of a Um. We should shout out Gordon Hubble. He's a megalodon expert who uh he had his theory now I think it's cool. He had his theory about the food source before. Uh, it officially came out when everyone else was going and now it was the climate. He actually theorized this beforehand. So good on you, sir. Um. He's the same guy who says no, no, no, there's no such thing as this megalodon still right, Yeah, because we should do one on cryptozoology as a whole. Um. There are people out there that want to believe that somewhere in the depths of the ocean and the deepest, darkest corners that we have explored, that there are these giant beasts still living, right, And actually they make great points. I mean, look at the Ceila canth. We thought the silic canth went extinct, and then it was caught off the coast of Africa um in the thirties I think South Africa, UM, and we realized, wow, this thing hasn't been extinct for a couple of hundred million years. And then in the seventies they found the megamouth shark, which is a here to four unknown shark species that fed on plankton deep deep deep in the ocean, and they caught one off of Hawaiian. They're like, this is new. So crypto zoologist point to these things and they say, how can you say that there definitely is no um megalodons out there still? And I think that same guy who you shouted out to says, well, here's why, because the the megamouth shark um, which is a plant eater, lives in this part of the ocean where we just don't tread. We're just now developing the technology to be able to go down there, so our path wouldn't really cross. A megalodon would have the same type of habitat that a regular shark has coastal regions, right, so we definitely would have noticed a megalodon by now, even if there was just one left in the whole world, we probably would have encountered it by now because our our habitats overlap a little bit. Then a sela can't. Isn't the size of a school bus in fairness. Yeah, So he kind of did a mic drop explanations and um that they haven't found any megalodon teeth that are not fossils, even though some people have claimed that, uh, it's all bs. Yeah, can we say that safely? I don't know. I think so. But that's not to say that some people haven't made great hay out of this stuff, including a guy named, um, what is that named Steve Alton. He wrote a series of books called meg about a megalodon that likes to battle people and dinosaurs and stuff and it's great fun. And then of course there's Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus. Have you seen that? No? I haven't either, but Debbie Gibson was in it apparently, Well sign me up. And then there is a sequel to it, um called Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus. Yeah, Tiffany, isn't that actually? Rkle Oh right, Julia White, good for him, and well, I guess we got to talk about the elephant in the room. Discovery Channel a couple of years ago, uh, Discovery Channel, our our former bosses. They aired a show um to kick off Shark Week about the megaladon that was had the look of a documentary. Um, if you didn't know any better, you would think it was real, where they claimed the Megaladon was real, and that it was um killing people off the coast of South Africa, and it was this giant beast uh sixty seven ft long, nickname a submarine and it's terrorizing humans and it was called Megalodon. The monster shark lives. Um. They to put it lightly, came under a little bit of fire from the viewing public, most notably, well, not most notably, but notably Will Wheaton. Uh, I don't know if we'll still listen to our show, but at one point he did listening. He was a friend of the show. Um. He wrote a blog post which I'm so glad he did that. He said a lot of things, but one of the things he said was Discovery had a chance to get its audience thinking about what the oceans were like when the Megalodon roamed and hunted in them, and had a chance to even show what could possibly happen if there were something that large and predatoring the ocean today. But Discovery Channel did not do that, and the cynical point for ratings the network deliberately lied to its audience and presented fiction as fact. They've betrayed its audience. UH. During its biggest viewing week of the year and Discovery channels that run by stupid people. This was not a mistake. Someone may to deliberate choice to present a work of fiction more suited for sci fi channel as truthful and factual. That is disgusting. Whoever made that decision should be ashamed. I was mad he got up on his uh hobby horse, rightfully so, and called him out. Sure, not a hobby horse. And here's the deal. After the show airs, they have their uh what do you call it when you put a disclaimer. Yeah, well they're sure they had a party because it was huge in the ratings. But it said none of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved its contents. Uh, those certain events and characters in this film have been dramatized. Sightings of Submarine continue to this day, which is total bs. Well, no, there are a lot of people crackpots. To this day, there are sightings or whatever, and Megalodon was a real shark. Legends of giant shark persist all over the world. There's still debate about what they may be. So basically people were like Twitter lit up on fire. People went crazy and said, Shark Week has jumped the shark officially, like you're airing fiction is fact. And they came out a year after that. Last year, I guess two years later, uh and the new brand, the brand new chief Rich Ross Cross Rich Ross uh and said, you know what, We're not gonna do things like eating alive. Remember when they were gonna have the snake eat the guy. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. That was just a huge stain on their brand. So we're not gonna do things like the Mermaids documentary and the Megalodon documentary. What are they gonna do? He said they were gonna try and get back to you know, educational programming. So how have they done that yet? When when did he say that? This is uh? And I think he wanted to make a push to sort of be the leader once again and smart educational programming and not keep ratings boys. So we'll see nice. Um. Yeah. The last thing I've got is if you love Megalodons and you have a lot of money, you can buy a Megalodon tooth for about bucks. I wondered about that hundred Semolean boy, I would be worried that things fake. Yeah, although I mean, like, if you look online, it'd be tough to fake one. No one, all right, I mean maybe to the discerning eye. But someone can make a fake one and show me right now, and it's say it looks real to me. Look at this? Maybe too, Maybe the artists shouldn't have signed the bottom. Yeah, right, that's it. I got nothing else megalodon. If you want to know more about those, you can type that word in the search bar. How stuff first dot com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mate, I'm gonna call this another one for the Equal pay Day episode because we've got something a little wrong we want to clear up. Um, whenever you guys touch on hey guys, big fan, whenever you guys touch on sensitive topics, I'm always a little worried. Is this going to be the time they say something that makes me have to stop listening? No? What you never do? Um? And this is from Ellen and she says, uh, you guys mentioned that in the US women are guaranteed twelve weeks of paid leave. I have to take that one. I said that. Okay, I'm assuming you're talking about the Family Medical Leave Act. I wanted to point out a few strict qualifications, though that don't apply to everyone. Uh. You must work for a public agency, including state, local, and federal employers and local education agencies like schools, or a private sector private sector employer to employee fifty or more employees for at least twenty work weeks in the current proceding calendar year, including joint employers and successors covered employees. And I had a nice exchange with some lady who this woman who had to quit her job and she got pregnant because it was under fifty employees. And she and I both conceded, like we kind of get it. If you have a really small business and you have eight employees and four of them get pregnant, you're kind of screwed employees. Yeah, And she was like, yeah, I get that, you know stuff. And she said, you know, people should sort of think about these things when they're going to get a job. A woman, if they want to have a baby, maybe go to a place that does have the f m l A qualify qualification. UM. So she, you know, she she got both sides of the issue. I so thought that was nice. UM. Also an employements work for a covered employer and have worked for that employee for at least twelve months and have worked for at least twelve d and fifty hours during that twelve months, and work at a location where at least fifty employees are employed at the location or within seventy five miles. So just more specificity there. Thank you for that, Yeah, she said, I'm not trying to call you guys out. I know a lot of people listen to your show up, and I think it's important to everyone understands how little support parents do have in terms of leave. We're way behind the rest of the world and it's not something we should be proud of. She said. We're only one of only seven countries in the world that doesn't have paid parential leave because it is also unpaid. So come on us get together. Yeah, and I'm sorry for miss speaking, but yeah, that's right. Also, my eyes are open, like I definitely didn't know all that for sure. Yeah, and I feel super lucky now because our company, Davis paid leave paternal and maternal leave, which I now realize is super generous. Yeah, it's pretty cool to how about that. Yeah, and you took it too, like a chance. Yeah, and that is from Ellen. Thanks a lot, Ellen. If you want to get in touch of this for any reason, we would love that. Just go ahead and tweet to us at s y s K podcast are joined the fun on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an emails and stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the win Stuff you Should dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com. H

This episode is brought to you by square Space. Start building your website today at square space dot com. Ter offer code stuff at check out to get ten percent off square Space. Set your website apart. Welcome to you Stuff you should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant's Jerry, This Joson John, and this is stuff you should know. Mega Loodon, Burgo Loodon, saxomaphone. Jerry, How where's yours? Nice? Jerry? Yeah, she's trained, well so, Chuck. Yep, you ever seen Mega Ladon? No, no, you haven't neither ye NEI there's any human being because they're extinct, that's right. Um, but they are pretty awesome. And when they were alive, you would not have wanted to see one anyway mm hmm well maybe from sure maybe until they learned to walk. Yeah, and you would have been like, oh, I regret coming to the shore today. Um. Caracodon megaladon, Yeah, I think I don't know if it's a carcrodon. How's that couch adon? Let's a carcrodon carchar I likedon right, that's the official name. Uh. And it was a real thing. It's not made up. Um, No, it is not the invention of a cryptozoologist or a sci fi writer. No, it was a real thing. It was a real thing. And giant, giant shark, I mean so giant. It's it's I don't want to overuse the word my bobbling, so I'm just gonna say incredible, you remarkable. Should we go and just say the size of a school bus? Yeah, I saw size of a greyhound bus. It's about the same size. Well, I guess, yeah, one smells a lot worse than the other. Which one and the greyhound? The school bus just smells like fear and disappointment, and the greyhound bus smells like all that plus days and days of body odor and farts and cigarette butts. Have you ever taken a long bus trip? That's a one from Arizona to Atlanta. It's it's the worst. Yeah, no, one, No. I think I might have talked about this. It didn't dawn on me until like day two. I was like, wait a minute, nobody is able to shower. We're all just getting stinkier. We're all eating garbage food and farting into our cloth seats. It was awful. How long did the trip take. It feels like it was like three days because you know, he's stop like every freaking two hours, you know, because you got account for you know, however many people on there, and it breaks down, didn't break down, and you just had to stop a lot for breaks, and we got stopped in Mississippi for a drug dog to come on. Oh really, did anybody getting in trouble? No, they just randomly stopped for the drop drug dog. And this German shepherd jumped all over the seats and they opened up the baggage underneath and he ran all over the place. So I guess then he went home and took a shower. Yeah, he was like man getting out of there. I guess smuggling drugs on a on a bus is Actually when I thought about it, was like, what a great idea, Yeah, because it's apparently under the radar. Yeah, and um, everybody else's smell is overpowering the smell of the drugs. You'd think they probably were tons of drugs on that bus and the dog was just like I had ten pounds of cocaine and they didn't smell that just kidding, So like you really needed to say just kidding. You never no kids listen to this, Yeah, probably especially this one. We want to say hello to all of the sixth grade classes that are listening to this right now, and we'd also like to say a special hello to our new sponsor, Greyhound Bus Lines. Leave the driving to them, so chuckers. Yes, um, where we are talking about the Megaladon, the biggest shark that ever lived, and it may have had from what I can understand, it makes sense too if you stop and think about it. It may have had the um most devastating as how I've seen it put bite of any animal that ever lived in the history of Earth. Yeah, I would say, I would say that's accurate. It was bigger than t rex. T Rex is very ferocious, had a very ferocious bite ergo ipso fact though it was probably um more ferocious as bite wise than t rex or anything else. Let's talk about it all right before, like years ago, people were dumb and they thought they found these fossils of these humongous six inch teeth, like a tooth itself. It's like larger than a hand, a human hand, like a largish human hand. So so again to put this in perspective, because everybody knows what great white teeth looked like about the size of a shot glass. It's a great white tooth. Okay, so about two inches. Um, these were six so three times larger than a great white tooth. And t Rex is right in the middle at something. Yeah, t Rex is at about four inches. So we're talking a megaladon tooth is fifteen centimeters in length, where great white sharks is about five centimeters. And that's we're a single tooth. I just went tooth, very very large, and I saw that they actually go up to seven inches as far as what they found. So four years ago people found these fossils and they said, oh my god, it's a petified dinosaur tongue, dragon tongue. Oh even better, Well, I have dragon, snakes and dinosaurs down in my research. I saw dragons only I believe in dragons four hundred years ago. Um. And then in sixteen sixty seven, Danish anatomus named Nicholas Stino said, these aren't tongues, their teeth. Don't be stupid, everybody, Yeah, these are gigantic teeth, and everybody's like, don't be ridiculous. They're they're dragon tongues. I'm wearing one around my neck as we speak, and I use it in my potions, along with eye of newt probably, so oh yeah, apparently they did use it in medicine. You find something that big, it's gotta have great powers short when you grind it up and snored it. So they found these teeth over the years, and these these fossils, uh, not only just the teeth, but something called CenTra c E N t R A H. And that is the uh it's not vertebrae, but it's a part of the spine that doesn't deteriorate, right, because here's the problem. A shark skeleton is made up almost entirely of cartilage, So no matter how big it is, over time that cartilage is going to break down and return to the dust on the bottom of the sea floor and you'll never know what was ever there. But luckily those teeth in the center are made of harder stuff and the teeth actually become fossilized. And there's another one of my favorite episodes that just flies under the radar. Fossil fossils was great, and that's an old one. So you remember the fossilization processes where the the individual atoms of this stuff are basically replaced by stone and the thing literally turns to stone. So anything organic and it is replaced by stone and it becomes fossilized in that sense. So that's why something like a tooth could survive. It becomes stone. And apparently the same thing goes with the center. So taking megalodon teeth and mega look at then CenTra. They started making calculations and measurements and figuring out like, oh my god, this thing was enormous. Yeah, and we've mentioned the t rex and dinosaurs a couple of times. They weren't. If you're picturing in your head dinosaurs roaming the earth and the megalodon swimming in the ocean fighting one another. Yeah, they didn't overlap by about forty five million years, so it wasn't even close. Uh. And of course humans we haven't been around that long at all in the Grand scheme, No Homo sapiens maybe a hundred thousand years or so. Yeah, so obviously we were not there during the time of the megalodon either. So our opening bit about standing on the beach watching them is was it was joked it's stanka bs just humor um. So dinosaurs were around from two hundred million years ago, just sixty five million years ago when the big asteroid hit, and then Megalodon was from twenty million years ago to about two million to one and a half million years ago. It seems like, so yeah, absolutely no overlap whatsoever. And I was just helping out a sixth grade class. Just so you mentioned before, these scientists were left with quite a task. It's not like finding of like a dinosaur U dinosaur's bones and saying, well, we can put it together. They didn't have a lot to go on with just the center in the teeth. But they're much smarter than we are, so they were able to do so. Yes, And one of the things that the CenTra actually shows two is growth rings. Right, so just like a tree, sharks actually have a a signature of growth. I guess you'd call it like a tree ring on their center on these kind of vertebrae like structures. They get one every year every season when it changes from I think warm to cold, they get a little growth ring. And so um, if you're an ichthyologist or a paleontologist or a paleoich theologist specifically, Yeah, you could look at one of these things and be like, oh, well, this this megalodon lived to a hundred fifty years old because it's a hundred and fifty rings. Yeah, and apparently, uh, wide light rings means you grew faster as a megalodon and narrow dark rings means you grew a little slower. So they can look at these growth rates in the Age of Death and just understand a little bit more about the Great journey to extinction. So you too will understand a little bit more about the Great Journey to extinction right after these messages, so check. They found teeth, and they found teeth actually all over the world. There's there's a lot. It's an amazing amount of stuff that they were able to glean from just finding some teeth in some CenTra here um. And one of the things that they figured out from the teeth is that, wow, we found teeth all over the world, in Europe, in India and Japan, in North America, South America, Africa, Australia. Basically they've been found around every continent except for Antarctica. And I would guess that if you could dig down through the ice sheets around Antarctica, you would probably find some megalodon teeth, yeah, because it was like very different a million years ago down there. As far as right now, Yeah, you'd like living in South Carolina. Nice coastal beach scene there. Imagine the megalodon swimming around. That's exactly what happened in two thousand nine. Um, some paleontologists from a a university in Florida. I'll just say that they very generous of you. They discovered some uh, some fossils. Uh. And these specifically were interesting because they were all little baby megalodons. It was a nursery. Yeah. And they discovered the same thing off the coast of South Carolina, which if you know how big something is when it dies, and you know how big it is when it's born, just add them together and divide by two and you have a pretty good idea of what it's life was like. Uh. And when they were little babies, they were just twenty long. Yet that cute. They figured out did you say that that nurser was found in Panama for those researchers, Uh, yeah, And then then I think the other one is off South Carolina. So they figured out from these teeth that Um, the megalodon infant was as big as the normal size great white shark adult, like a pretty big great white. Yeah, that's like on the larger side. Yeah, that's amazing. Twenty ft long are the babies. That's like um, baby huey basically, but as a shark. So this means um, clearly, this is the apex predator of its time. Um, and it can. Well, it probably went everywhere because it could, but because nothing threatened it, you could eat. It could eat whatever it wanted to. And all things suggest that they had a lot of whales, balleen whales. They found teeth marks on whale bones. They even found teeth stuck in whale fossils. Oh yeah, pretty exciting. No, what happened there? They were in the middle of the meal when they got wiped out or they lost a tooth and it went down with the whale. Well it said teeth though, like maybe they just lost it, but maybe it was like me and it bit into the chicken bone started dropping teeth. Was that what happened? The chicken bone? The second one, Yeah, broke off at the Falcons game. It didn't hurt, right, You told us about that. It was so weird. I was like, well, my tooth just broken half okay, as long as didn't as long as it didn't hurt. And I went and sat back down to my seat and was just passed out from the pain that suddenly swarmed. No, there was no pain. The only pain was watching the falcons this season. Uh so they weighed between fifty a hundred tons and they could eat up to twenty hundred pounds of food a day. I love this. I love the comparison. I wasn't gonna do it. Okay, we won't go ahead. The author said, that's five hundred more pounds than the average American eats in a year. Just such a dumb comparison. But it's also hilarious in every way. I think good comparisons are one where it really hits home like that doesn't. So the author should have been like, that's fifty big max. Maybe that would have satisfied me times fifty Uh terrible. Um did we say, chuck? How big? The um? The mouth is based on these reconstructions. No, they put you know, how you see the big giant shark mouth. Sometimes it's from a real shark, and sometimes they just put it together. In this case, they put it together. Yeah, but the mouthful feature like real megalodon teeth. But the jaws, the bone jaws or cartlet shaws are obviously resin right. But you'll frequently see somebody standing in one of these and they're just dwarfed by it. And this is pretty accurate. Apparently they had it was reasonable for a megalodon to have a seven foot diameter, which is who knows how many meters to at least in diameter the mouth, and so like I saw this one. I think shark facts or something shark inside or some site was basically like, actually, if megalodon were alive today, you wouldn't have to worry about it because it would be like you eating a cheese it and calling that a meal. They wouldn't even bother with you. I would not gamble that and swim around it, because even if it just opened its mouth, you'd just go right in. Well, we like cheese, it's exactly. Yeah. Uh, and if there's a whole box of humans, that megalodon would probably eat the whole thing, as a box of humans is called the school bus. That's right full circle. Oh my gosh, Chuck, So you talked a little earlier about the bite force. Um, this is a good comparison, I think because it does hit home. Um specialist, specialist. It's a weird thing to say experts. Experts, she means cardiologists. Yeah, experts and researchers say that a megala don's bite force was akin to us eating a grape, them eating a whale skull. So it could chomp through a whale skull the same as we could much do a grape, even those of us with fewer teeth. Yeah, and again it's not just the bite wasn't so bad just because there the teeth are so big and the the mouth was had such a wide diameter. It was designed basically to yeah, to crush, to disabled, to to disfigure in mame and pillage that kind of stuff. That's right. So yeah, it would be able to crush the skull very easily, and it did. Um. As a matter of fact, the podcast art for this episode has a megaladon eating a whale Like it's nothing. Man, it's an artist's rendering. It's not a underwater photograph. But it's pretty cool. Nonetheless, you know, it's also cool is us taking a break? Oh yeah, so let's do that, and we'll come back and we'll finish up on the mighty micheladon Marldon stop. So how are these dudes? Remember one and a half to two million years to twenty million years is when they lived. I'm not sure how long they lived, and I'm not sure that ich theology just to paleoic theologists know yet. Well, I said, they guess they became distinct about two million years ago. No, I mean how long they lived in like the lifespans area, it was pretty big. I don't know. Well, I mean most large like whale, sharks and whales, they have long lives. Listen, one hunts them. But they think they went extinct a couple of million years ago during the Playo placed to scene period. And um, we actually featured an article just a few days ago about a new study on what they think caused the extinction because they used to think it had more to do with climate changes that they couldn't keep up with. Yeah, but um, I believe the same researchers who figured out the um or who found that Panamanian nursery. Um. Also we're the ones who conducted this study. Maybe not, but um, they they showed that the global ocean temperatures rose, was and um declined during this eighteen million year period where the megalodon was around, and they're still Megalodon. Yeah, their populations apparently didn't change. So they've basically said, no, we don't think it was temperature climate change that did it. We think it was a lack of diversity in the prey. Well, yeah, and I guess what you were talking about, like eating a human, Like you know, we'll say a human is six ft tall. That's still pretty large. And if that's not a cheese it, then you need to eat super large things and a lot of them. And you better hope those large things are successful at reproducing as well, because they go away, you're in big trouble. And they basically think that's what happened. The food sources became less diverse, and then smaller predators evolved and started competing and we should probably faster and better at hunting. And what happened by smaller they mean orcas. Yeah, like that's that that was their smaller competition for the same prey. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, and uh, who was it? The Zurix Paleontological Paleontological Institute in Museum they examined two hundred Megalodon records and came up with this new information, and they flat out said, changing climactic conditions do not appear to have had any influence. Yeah, they're like ocean hot, ocean cold. We love it either way. Yeah, And I mean if you if you're competing with an uh an organism or species that is going after the same prey but doesn't need as much as you to eat per day, you're going to lose evolutionarily speaking, that it could very easily be what it is. And because Megalodon, the recreations of them look a lot like um great whites, a lot of people are like, well, they're obviously great white ancestors. Apparently not. Apparently they are more closely related to mako sharks, right, yeah, mako sharks um and poor beagles sharks, although they would share some sort of relation to um Great whites because they would both be lamb uniforms. And the lamb niform is a shark with two dorsal fins, five gill slits in the mouth that extends back beyond the eyes, so they can smile real wide after they eat a whole boat full of people. So I was about to do the Jaws line. Smile you son of a Um. We should shout out Gordon Hubble. He's a megalodon expert who uh he had his theory now I think it's cool. He had his theory about the food source before. Uh, it officially came out when everyone else was going and now it was the climate. He actually theorized this beforehand. So good on you, sir. Um. He's the same guy who says no, no, no, there's no such thing as this megalodon still right, Yeah, because we should do one on cryptozoology as a whole. Um. There are people out there that want to believe that somewhere in the depths of the ocean and the deepest, darkest corners that we have explored, that there are these giant beasts still living, right, And actually they make great points. I mean, look at the Ceila canth. We thought the silic canth went extinct, and then it was caught off the coast of Africa um in the thirties I think South Africa, UM, and we realized, wow, this thing hasn't been extinct for a couple of hundred million years. And then in the seventies they found the megamouth shark, which is a here to four unknown shark species that fed on plankton deep deep deep in the ocean, and they caught one off of Hawaiian. They're like, this is new. So crypto zoologist point to these things and they say, how can you say that there definitely is no um megalodons out there still? And I think that same guy who you shouted out to says, well, here's why, because the the megamouth shark um, which is a plant eater, lives in this part of the ocean where we just don't tread. We're just now developing the technology to be able to go down there, so our path wouldn't really cross. A megalodon would have the same type of habitat that a regular shark has coastal regions, right, so we definitely would have noticed a megalodon by now, even if there was just one left in the whole world, we probably would have encountered it by now because our our habitats overlap a little bit. Then a sela can't. Isn't the size of a school bus in fairness. Yeah, So he kind of did a mic drop explanations and um that they haven't found any megalodon teeth that are not fossils, even though some people have claimed that, uh, it's all bs. Yeah, can we say that safely? I don't know. I think so. But that's not to say that some people haven't made great hay out of this stuff, including a guy named, um, what is that named Steve Alton. He wrote a series of books called meg about a megalodon that likes to battle people and dinosaurs and stuff and it's great fun. And then of course there's Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus. Have you seen that? No? I haven't either, but Debbie Gibson was in it apparently, Well sign me up. And then there is a sequel to it, um called Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus. Yeah, Tiffany, isn't that actually? Rkle Oh right, Julia White, good for him, and well, I guess we got to talk about the elephant in the room. Discovery Channel a couple of years ago, uh, Discovery Channel, our our former bosses. They aired a show um to kick off Shark Week about the megaladon that was had the look of a documentary. Um, if you didn't know any better, you would think it was real, where they claimed the Megaladon was real, and that it was um killing people off the coast of South Africa, and it was this giant beast uh sixty seven ft long, nickname a submarine and it's terrorizing humans and it was called Megalodon. The monster shark lives. Um. They to put it lightly, came under a little bit of fire from the viewing public, most notably, well, not most notably, but notably Will Wheaton. Uh, I don't know if we'll still listen to our show, but at one point he did listening. He was a friend of the show. Um. He wrote a blog post which I'm so glad he did that. He said a lot of things, but one of the things he said was Discovery had a chance to get its audience thinking about what the oceans were like when the Megalodon roamed and hunted in them, and had a chance to even show what could possibly happen if there were something that large and predatoring the ocean today. But Discovery Channel did not do that, and the cynical point for ratings the network deliberately lied to its audience and presented fiction as fact. They've betrayed its audience. UH. During its biggest viewing week of the year and Discovery channels that run by stupid people. This was not a mistake. Someone may to deliberate choice to present a work of fiction more suited for sci fi channel as truthful and factual. That is disgusting. Whoever made that decision should be ashamed. I was mad he got up on his uh hobby horse, rightfully so, and called him out. Sure, not a hobby horse. And here's the deal. After the show airs, they have their uh what do you call it when you put a disclaimer. Yeah, well they're sure they had a party because it was huge in the ratings. But it said none of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved its contents. Uh, those certain events and characters in this film have been dramatized. Sightings of Submarine continue to this day, which is total bs. Well, no, there are a lot of people crackpots. To this day, there are sightings or whatever, and Megalodon was a real shark. Legends of giant shark persist all over the world. There's still debate about what they may be. So basically people were like Twitter lit up on fire. People went crazy and said, Shark Week has jumped the shark officially, like you're airing fiction is fact. And they came out a year after that. Last year, I guess two years later, uh and the new brand, the brand new chief Rich Ross Cross Rich Ross uh and said, you know what, We're not gonna do things like eating alive. Remember when they were gonna have the snake eat the guy. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. That was just a huge stain on their brand. So we're not gonna do things like the Mermaids documentary and the Megalodon documentary. What are they gonna do? He said they were gonna try and get back to you know, educational programming. So how have they done that yet? When when did he say that? This is uh? And I think he wanted to make a push to sort of be the leader once again and smart educational programming and not keep ratings boys. So we'll see nice. Um. Yeah. The last thing I've got is if you love Megalodons and you have a lot of money, you can buy a Megalodon tooth for about bucks. I wondered about that hundred Semolean boy, I would be worried that things fake. Yeah, although I mean, like, if you look online, it'd be tough to fake one. No one, all right, I mean maybe to the discerning eye. But someone can make a fake one and show me right now, and it's say it looks real to me. Look at this? Maybe too, Maybe the artists shouldn't have signed the bottom. Yeah, right, that's it. I got nothing else megalodon. If you want to know more about those, you can type that word in the search bar. How stuff first dot com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mate, I'm gonna call this another one for the Equal pay Day episode because we've got something a little wrong we want to clear up. Um, whenever you guys touch on hey guys, big fan, whenever you guys touch on sensitive topics, I'm always a little worried. Is this going to be the time they say something that makes me have to stop listening? No? What you never do? Um? And this is from Ellen and she says, uh, you guys mentioned that in the US women are guaranteed twelve weeks of paid leave. I have to take that one. I said that. Okay, I'm assuming you're talking about the Family Medical Leave Act. I wanted to point out a few strict qualifications, though that don't apply to everyone. Uh. You must work for a public agency, including state, local, and federal employers and local education agencies like schools, or a private sector private sector employer to employee fifty or more employees for at least twenty work weeks in the current proceding calendar year, including joint employers and successors covered employees. And I had a nice exchange with some lady who this woman who had to quit her job and she got pregnant because it was under fifty employees. And she and I both conceded, like we kind of get it. If you have a really small business and you have eight employees and four of them get pregnant, you're kind of screwed employees. Yeah, And she was like, yeah, I get that, you know stuff. And she said, you know, people should sort of think about these things when they're going to get a job. A woman, if they want to have a baby, maybe go to a place that does have the f m l A qualify qualification. UM. So she, you know, she she got both sides of the issue. I so thought that was nice. UM. Also an employements work for a covered employer and have worked for that employee for at least twelve months and have worked for at least twelve d and fifty hours during that twelve months, and work at a location where at least fifty employees are employed at the location or within seventy five miles. So just more specificity there. Thank you for that, Yeah, she said, I'm not trying to call you guys out. I know a lot of people listen to your show up, and I think it's important to everyone understands how little support parents do have in terms of leave. We're way behind the rest of the world and it's not something we should be proud of. She said. We're only one of only seven countries in the world that doesn't have paid parential leave because it is also unpaid. So come on us get together. Yeah, and I'm sorry for miss speaking, but yeah, that's right. Also, my eyes are open, like I definitely didn't know all that for sure. Yeah, and I feel super lucky now because our company, Davis paid leave paternal and maternal leave, which I now realize is super generous. Yeah, it's pretty cool to how about that. Yeah, and you took it too, like a chance. Yeah, and that is from Ellen. Thanks a lot, Ellen. If you want to get in touch of this for any reason, we would love that. Just go ahead and tweet to us at s y s K podcast are joined the fun on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an emails and stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the win Stuff you Should dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com. H