London, June 1: A latest study has revealed that prehistoric food fight might have had put an end of the megalodon, the largest shark that ever lived.
BBC quoted the study of the ocean giant’s fossil teeth as stating that it had to compete for food with another ferocious predator, the great white shark.
It is likely that the battle for diminishing stocks of whales and other prey miight have pushed the megalodon to extinction 3 million years ago.
Besides, environmental pressures such as sea level changes could also have a role in the extinction.
According to BBC, the international researchers in the latest study used zinc isotopes in the teeth of living and extinct sharks as a tool to understand the diet of long-dead animals.
The chemical clues in the teeth of living sharks and 3 fossil megalodon teeth have suggested that the great white shark and the megalodon once had similar positions in the food cycle and they might be competitors for the same food, including whales, dolphins and porpoises.
“This is a piece in the puzzle of evidence that there was competition between the modern great white and the megalodon on aquatic food resources in the oceans at the time when both were still alive,” said Prof Thomas Tutken of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, who led the study.
The study has been published in Nature Communications.
However, Catalina Pimiento of Swansea University said that more research in needed to solve the mystery of what happened to the megalodon.
