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(01-10-2022, 12:08 PM)Ediacaran Wrote: There are very well preserved fossils of Cretalamna, Megalodon's directly ancestral species via anagenesis. If you applied allometry to our knowledge of what Cretalamna looked like, I figure that would be a close approximation of Megalodon's real life appearance.
The shark fossil picture you posted isn't Cretalamna, it is the carcharhiniform Pteroscyllium signeuxi from Lebanon.
O. Megalodon probably looked like an oversized lamnoid shark, not as slender as the makos or the great white shark but closer in appearance to the Lamna genus (porbeagle and salmon shark). Paleoartists needs to stop using the great white shark countershading on O. Megalodon since it lived in coastal tropical/subtropical seas unlike the great white sharks that are more adapted to temperate water.
*This image is copyright of its original author
Here is a well-preserved fossilized skull of Cosmopolitodus hastalis from Peru, this shark is closely related to the great white shark (unlike O. Megalodon) but it was a bit larger and was also contemporary of O. Megalodon.