Great Teeth, Dead Whales & Dragon Tongues

Aug 13, 2026

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with sharks. Like, a somewhat concerning fixation. I used to stare out at the ocean from the beach and try to catch a fleeting glimpse of a fin breaking the water or a shark jumping out of the ocean to snag a seal. All of this was happening from the shoreline of a North Carolina beach, so I probably wasn’t going to see a breaching Great White, but after years of Shark Week indoctrination (when it was still good) on the Discovery Channel, I was hell-bent on seeing it for myself.

Not only was I spending more time than I should have staring at the sea at 9 years old, I also made it somewhat of a personal mission to see every shark movie ever made. There are the obvious ones like Jaws, Deep Blue Sea, and Open Water, but I was also watching the not-so-great ones like Blue Demon, Red Water, and Cruel Jaws. I went so far as to seek out the movie Orca, as it seemed like a pretty decent adjacent option. (Spoiler: It’s absolutely terrible in all of the good ways. I highly recommend it if you're a connoisseur of the horrible.)

A collection of award-winning, heart-touching and deeply inspiring shark movies.

Years go by, the world keeps spinning, and here I am, working at Paxton Gate. Yeah, we carry a ton of cool stuff, but nothing, and I truly mean nothing, comes close to igniting my inner dork like Megalodon teeth. My inner child never fails to flip out every time we get new Megalodon teeth in. It’s probably pretty obvious why. Gigantic shark teeth from an animal as big as a bus. Makes sense, case closed, right?

Well, not really.

Like all of our fossils, there is so much more to them than just that surface-level, “Oh, that’s neat,” initial thought, and I’m about to geek all the way out and tell you all about it, plus some random detours, as I am prone to take. Please note: this isn’t meant to be a scientific work, though there is a lot of that in here, but rather the musings of a nerd who got to grow up and work with Megalodon teeth for a living.

You have been warned.

Otodus megalodon: Roughly translated as “great tooth”
Approximately 23 to 3.6 million years ago
Miocene Epoch into the Pliocene Epoch

Megalodon & Great White size comparison chart.

If you have ever seen the movie The Meg, you’ll already have a factual and real scientific basis for the Megalodon.

Just kidding.

As much as I love a good cheese feast with the award-winning actor Jason Statham, it’s all sorts of goofy in its portrayal of the Megalodon. It makes some huge leaps in logic, like the Megalodon surviving to the modern day by living in the Mariana Trench. Its size is pushed to the extreme, and it can bite through just about anything, including submarines. While this does make for a somewhat entertaining movie (it’s about a C+ movie in my opinion), it’s overall just Hollywood making a fun monster for Mr. Statham to blow up. So sure, it’s easy to pick apart the logic here, but the better question is: how do we know it’s wrong?

Like all sharks, the Megalodon had a skeleton made primarily of cartilage, though parts of that cartilage were heavily calcified. While cartilage can fossilize, it’s extremely rare, which is why teeth make up the overwhelming majority of Megalodon fossils we find. We also have fossilized vertebrae and, much more rarely, pieces of calcified cartilage from other parts of the skeleton. It seems like that would only give us the barest idea of what the Megalodon was actually like, but in reality, those remains can tell us a surprising amount about it.

Charles J. Lang inside a reconstructed Megalodon jaw at the American Museum of Natural History, 1909. Photograph by Thomas Lunt.

For one, sharks have been around for more than 400 million years, surviving multiple mass extinctions while continually evolving into new forms, but the blueprint is there. For example, if we look at, say, the Great White’s teeth, you’ll see that they’re serrated. Essentially, a mouth full of steak knives. We’ve got plenty of research and observations of their hunting and feeding behaviors. White sharks don’t grab hold of food with long, dagger-like teeth like the Mako shark, for instance. Their broad, serrated teeth are extremely well suited for ripping and tearing flesh. I’d make a Doom joke here, but it practically writes itself.

Anyways, when hunting something like a sea lion, which is actually pretty dangerous prey (they’re cute but deceptively deadly), a Great White can inflict a devastating initial bite and then release it rather than continuing to wrestle with the animal. The shark can then return to its wounded prey. Pretty grim stuff, but nature can be pretty brutal. Probably why there are so many metal albums that are shark themed. No seriously. Like a ton of them. Mastodon's "Leviathan" and Squalus “The Great Fish” to name a few. Both are great by the way. I bet you didn’t expect musical recommendations in this but here we are.

All of this is neat and all, but what does it have to do with the Megalodon?

Well, the Megalodon’s teeth have some striking similarities to those of the Great White, but they’re huge. Like, juiced up on the strongest steroids and pulled straight from a fever dream huge. Both have broad, triangular, serrated teeth that are extremely well suited for cutting through flesh. That doesn’t mean Megalodon was simply a giant Great White, though. It belonged to an entirely different lineage of sharks, and we can’t know exactly how it hunted just by looking at its teeth.

What we can do is look at what those teeth were physically capable of doing and combine that with the evidence Megalodon left behind on its prey. That gives us a pretty damn good window into the feeding behavior of an animal that died out roughly 3.6 million years ago.

Some goober who works here holding a Megalodon tooth.

Now that you’ve got an idea of what those monstrously sharp teeth were capable of doing, the next question is: what did they use them on?

Fortunately, Megalodon left behind some pretty gruesome receipts.

Paleontologists have found fossilized whale and other marine mammal bones bearing enormous bite marks and tooth scores attributed to Megalodon. In some remarkable specimens, broken pieces of Megalodon teeth have even been found embedded in fossil whale bones. The fossil record can’t always tell us whether Megalodon killed a particular animal or simply stumbled across its carcass and helped itself, but taken together, the evidence makes one thing pretty clear: marine mammals were absolutely on the menu.

Great Whites today have been seen scavenging whale carcasses and will happily tear off chunks of calorie-rich, rotting whale blubber (Yum!), and Megalodon almost certainly wasn't above a free meal either. But fossil evidence also points toward active attacks on marine mammals.

And whales weren't the only things on the menu. Megalodon fed on a variety of marine animals, with fossil evidence pointing to dolphins, seals and their relatives, sirenians like ancient dugongs, sea turtles, fish, and even other sharks. So, basically everything. If you were a sizable marine animal swimming around back then, there was a non-zero chance you were gonna get eaten.

To be fair, though, back then in those oceans, about 99% of everything was out to eat you. It was literally monster soup.

Obviously, the other fossil remains of the Megalodon can tell us a lot about its size and give us clues about its body shape and what it could have looked like, but the teeth are objectively the coolest part.

Speaking of observations of the fossils themselves, there’s a fun story about these teeth in particular. In ye olden days, long before people understood what fossil shark teeth actually were, Europeans sometimes called them “tongue stones,” or glossopetrae. But what mouth did these tongues fit in?

A dragon, obviously.

(There is always a way to fit some kind of dork stuff into these blogs if I try hard enough, it seems.)

Elephant and dragon from a 13th-century French bestiary. BnF Latin 6838 B, fol. 4v.

Okay, people had a few different explanations for what these mysterious stones actually were, with serpents and other suitably fantastical origins getting thrown into the mix. But come on. Look at one. Their shape and appearance made them perfect evidence for the existence of real-life monsters. When you think about it, it does kinda add up. Giant pointed rock thing. Sharp on the edges. Made of stone. Seems legit to me. You’d probably need a stone tongue if you were vomiting up fire and death on the daily.

Then, in 1666, a huge shark was caught near Livorno, Italy, and someone had the bright idea to send its head to the Danish anatomist Niels Stensen, better known as Nicolas Steno, who proceeded to ruin the fun for everyone.

Steno realized that the teeth of the decapitated shark looked remarkably similar to the mysterious tongue stones being dug out of rock. He wasn't the first person to suggest that these stones might have come from sharks, but his detailed study helped demonstrate the connection between the mysterious stones and the teeth of actual living sharks.

Nicolaus Steno’s 1667 illustration comparing a shark’s head and teeth, part of his work connecting shark teeth to the mysterious “tongue stones.”

Which presented a much bigger question: if these were shark teeth, how the hell did they end up inside solid rock?

Steno's attempts to answer questions like that eventually helped him develop ideas about how sediment and rock layers form and how objects become buried within them. Those ideas became foundational to stratigraphy and helped lay some of the groundwork for modern geology.

So, in a roundabout way, mysterious stone “tongues” that people once attributed to all sorts of fantastical origins helped us better understand the history of the entire freaking planet.

Still kinda wish they were dragon tongues, though.

This is why we can’t have nice things. Science.

Just kidding (hopefully obviously), but I do wish we could have pretended a little longer that dragons were a real thing.

Before I go too deep into lamenting the nonexistence of dragons, I should probably wrap it up here. Thanks for tuning in yet again and reading through my ramblings. I will say that I am beyond fortunate to have landed where I did here at Paxton Gate. Handling real Megalodon teeth was a childhood dream that I’m actively living out.

You can also realize the same dream by picking up a beyond-rad Megalodon tooth here. I try not to throw a sales pitch into these because, for some reason, you’ve taken the time to read my scribblings, but these are just that cool. It’s not so much a sales pitch as a recommendation.

Your inner child staring out at the sea will thank you.

Mine did.

- Harrison