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Prehistoric Sharks
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 (06-29-2023, 06:31 PM)Apex Titan Wrote: There's no way that a single Leviathan would be able to defeat multiple large male megalodon's. That video is highly unrealistic and ridiculous. Leviathan was just an ancient sperm whale with much larger teeth and more predatory, but would be no match for an adult megalodon. The megalodon was larger, more powerful and more lethally equipped for killing than any other ocean predator ever. Prehistoric animals are a mystery, best thing we can do is to try to study modern animals and see how they could correlate with the past ones. It sounds simple but there are several problems, as many of the past animals are just far related with the modern ones and we know that modern animals had particular behavious that we will not knew if we could not observe them directly. The video is just a fan art, nothing more and nothing less, no more valuable than the Rex vs Spino fight in JP3. We can't avoid people express they ideas, I learned that in the hard way. But talking about the real animals, we don't know if these species were solitary or if lived in groups, and we can only "guess" based in modern species. Most of sharks are solitary and they just come in groups when there is a good food source like happen with the white and tiger sharks, so we can guess that most of the time Carcharocles (otodus) megalodon was solitary but we can also guess that they could tolerate each other under special circunstances. About Livyatan melvillei we have the same problem, we can say that modern whales are groupal, but that is an oversimplification and even social animals like orcas have individuals (large males most of the time) that travel alone, and to add more salt to the soup, the modern relatives of this species, which are the two genus of sperm whales, have completelly different behaviors, so we can guess that as they are cetaceans they could travel in groups of "pods", but if they are like modern Physeter, males will be loners. So, as you can see, this is just a game of probabilities, based in more or less closer relatives, and the evidence suggest a behaviour contrary to what we see in the video. In fact, I will suggest that the video should be a big Megalodon killing young and female Livyatans until a big male arrive and kill it, that will have more sense honestly. Now about the experts and why Livyatan is not mentioned. Honestly, tiger supporters had the same problem with the romans, if tiger won must of the fights why the romans supported the lion as the most powerfull cat? Well, the answer was simple, tigers were know in Europe until the time of Alexander the great and was only one skin, and alive tigers arrived to Rome like a gift to Augustus until year 11 B.C.E. for the dedication of the Theater of Marcellus. In fact, no more than 200 tigers were presented to the Romans in all they history, a ridicuous amount if we take in count that romans killed more than 300 or even 500 lions in just one show, and they had many of this shows! Lions were highly familiar to the Romans, and the new arrival was no match for the imagination and "love" for the old signs, so tiger were never familiar to the Romas as lions do. Now, it you ask to any marine predator experts about what is a Livyatan, I can tell that not all of them know about it, in fact prehistoric marine mammals are highly unknown to many experts and also most of the people outside, remember that we have less than 10 papers that mention it (only 4 specific about it) while on the other hand Megalodon is incredible famous, almoust like T. rex. To put other analogy, ask people about Mapusaurus and they will have no idea what you are talking about. We have no documental, no movie, nothing about Livyatan, or any other prehistoric cetacean, apart from Basilosaurus and maybe Brygmophyseter (and this last one was baddly represented), so there is no surprise why there is a "consensus" that Megalodon is the "champion". But this is going to change in the future years, now that the knowledge is been shared at higher speed and more people is knowing about the prehistoric cetaceans. In fact, there is many people that is surprise to know how small where the first whales. So, playing the card that "most of experts" or that documentaries/movies "adamantly" show that Megalodon is the undisputed king is not correct, because you are just taking advantage of the circumstances and the lack of knowledge, basically using a falacy to back up a statement without base. If you going to back up an statement you must use facts, and there are no facts that Megalodon "won" agains Livyatan, or the other way around. The only thing that we know is that these two animals were the top predators of they area, that they compete for the same resources and that at the end both whent extinct. Also, remember that marine predators must of the time hunt smaller animales than themselves (orca is the exception, when hunt in groups), and "if" Livyatan lived in groups, with a similar size than the average sized Meg, probably the big shark will avoid those pods of cetaceas and focus in the more easy prey like the "small" Cetotheriums. But all this is just speculation at the end, although based in the behaviour of modern animals. I am not going to touch the point about sizes as is a real mess, because the "Meg" change every new study, and for "Liv" we have only one "official" estimation. However, at least, one more-or-less complete skull is better that a bunch of teeth and a lot of speculation, I think. |
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