There's a fascinating new clue to the giant megalodon's extinction

The reconstructed jaws of the megalodon are one of the most striking fossils.

One or two people can stand in the jaws of a shark. Some 20 million to 3.6 million years ago, a shark species that preyed on whales and large fish was a dominant predator. They are 50 feet long and are larger than a city bus.

There is an ongoing investigation into the cause of the creature's death. In research recently published in the science journal Nature Communications, earth scientists and biologists found preserved chemical evidence that the megalodon and great white sharks coexisted as apex predator near the end of the megalodon's reign.

According to Kenshu Shimada, one of the study's authors, they seem to have the same position in the food chain.

They were competitors for other people's food.

Competition was thought to be the cause of the extinction of the megalodon. According to the research, the two species ate the same food in the world's oceans for up to 3 million years. This study was not done by Boessenecker. He said that the megalodons were put at a disadvantage because they probably took longer to grow so large. The bigger, more energy-demanding megalodon would not have been able to reproduce as fast as the whites.

Credit: Kenshu Shimada

Many extinction stories are not easy to understand. The cooling of global temperatures during the Pliocene may have been a factor. Life may have been more difficult for megalodons because of the cooler oceans. The drop in ocean temperatures likely resulted in a loss of habitat for the sharks as they were dependent on tropical waters. It's possible that the megalodon's prey went extinct or adapted to the cooler waters and moved to where the sharks couldn't follow.

During the Pliocene, many marine creatures went extinct. It's possible that great white sharks are better suited to survive in a changing world because they can eat less.

Credit: Ethan Miller / Getty Images

The giant megalodon teeth

Fossilized meGalodon teeth, which can be the size of a human hand, are scattered around the planet. sharks lose thousands and thousands of teeth during their lives because their jaws are lined with hundreds of teeth There were a lot of the megalodon's hard teeth that were fossils.

Researchers analyzed the zinc in the teeth of the great white sharks and megalodons to find out what they ate millions of years ago. The zinc in animals' teeth is an important indicator of their position in the food chain. Smaller sharks that eat fish have different zinc compositions than larger sharks that eat plankton.

The great white sharks and megalodons were likely competing for the same prey in the early Pliocene.

The tale of the megalodon's demise is not over. Researchers have shown for the first time that zinc is preserved in shark teeth for millions of years.

"The use of zinc isotopes for fossils could very well change the way we study the food webs of extinct marine vertebrates, and I am very excited to see what comes next."