>Lost megalodon vertebrae resurface, confirming 80-foot size estimatehttps://phys.org/news/2026-06-lost-megalodon-vertebrae-resurface-foot.html
>>5138915I thought this was already established
>>5138952It was, but I just found a megalodon vertebrae that suggests they were actually only 12 inches long and buried themselves with whale spines to confuse people.
>>5138952It was speculation based on old vertebrae that were actually lost, but due to the recent paper they actually decided to look for them and they were found in some boxes.Paleontology is a bit of a joke if thats how they handle their precious fossils, I mean it just keeps happening. There's so many speciments lost in storage that people still haven't found and arent actively looking for.
>>5138915>shark gets big to eat whales>whales get bigger to not get eaten>shark gets bigger to eat whalesIn hindsight, is it that surprising? Predator-prey arms races happen all the time, and there's no reason megalodon wouldn't get bigger to match the prey it evolved with.
>>5139091It's because studying the natural history of the Earth outside of opportunities for mineral and petroleum exploitation doesn't make any money. The only things that receive full attention now are things that deliver immediate returns to a board of Jewish shareholders forcing a scammy Indian CEO to dance like a monkey on a table, or which pump out as much garbage as possible for women and browns to consume like Netflix shows, niggerball, Jewish Broadway performances, social media algorithms, smut, HR ethics and equity guidelines, clothes and shoes. The West as it exists now never could have made the paleontological breakthroughs it did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or actually in any of the artistic or scientific fields it did - we decided all that shit was boring and for crackers who should shut up and let black folx speak. It would be sat on by a small closed club of grifters who make money by shitting out papers with either wild speculation or crap like this every now and again and ancient animals would be given Crystal Palace-tier reconstructions while Jews throw billions more into talkshows for women and nigger monkeys chasing a ball, and academia becomes a knitting club for women and browns with constant fraud and clown papers being published rehashing the same shit (Does Vitamin D deficiency being linked to viral infection point to an evidence-based etiological merger of germ and terrain theory?????)
>>5139223Oh and let's not forget constant vaporware and overpromising and underdelivering because every single tech oligopoly is a yehudi spyware employment program for women with a 5th grade reading level and nails too long to type and hindu rape rats. That shit really embodies the whole problem. Would a society which produces Windows 11 really put that much effort into researching things which existed an insanely long time ago and which provide no immediate tangible benefit just because they're awe-inspiring, beautiful and give us a sense of perspective on the world?
>>5138952>The study suggests that this particular megalodon was a little over 24 m long, an estimate that had already been suggested before based on photographs of the then lost specimen; the scary part is that the authors consider they may have grown even bigger, up to c. 28 m, which would place them in the same size range as the largest whales today, and as some of the largest ichthyosaurs known. We've only just begun
>>5138915>"paleontologists always nerf things!" motherfuckers when otodus megalodon brings his 28 meter ass into the room