What caused this enormous megalodon to experience such excruciating dental pain?

The megalodon tooth appeared to have been injured at some point, which may have caused it to become deformed.

An imaginative recreation shows the prehistoric shark Otodus megalodon devouring an old swordfish that lived millions of years ago. The unusual growth that the researchers observed in the tooth of the great white shark may have resulted from a puncture injury.

An imaginative recreation shows the prehistoric shark Otodus megalodon devouring an old swordfish that lived millions of years ago. The unusual growth that the researchers observed in the tooth of the great white shark may have resulted from a puncture injury.

Even the deadly ocean carnivore is known as the megalodon, which lived millions of years ago and was the largest shark that ever lived but is now extinct and has experienced teeth problems.

A recent examination of a megalodon (Otodus megalodon) tooth with an unusual irregularity — a groove down the middle — suggests that the dental deformity may trace its roots to an injury to the enormous shark's jaw, possibly caused by prey that fought back against the megalodon. An artwork depicting one possible interaction depicts a fish using its pointed bill to penetrate the jaw of the chasing predator. This may have been the initial event that led to the megalodon developing a split tooth.

According to what the researchers reported in a recent paper, one possible option is that the spine of a stingray stabbed the large shark.

The authors of the study wrote that genetic factors, disease, or injury can sometimes affect tooth buds and cause a dental abnormality known as "double tooth pathology." In this condition, a single tooth grows with a split running lengthwise down its center. This condition can occur in humans as well as in other mammals. These teeth can be the result of two dental buds fusing to form a single tooth, a process known as fusion, or they can be the result of a single tooth bud dividing into two tooth buds, a process known as germination. On the other hand, sharks lack information regarding this disease.

For the study, the researchers examined a split megalodon tooth that was four inches long (ten centimeters). They split fossil teeth from other sharks to determine what may have caused the abnormalities. The researchers concluded that a traumatic injury was the most likely origin of the prehistoric split teeth. They hypothesized that the incident resulting in the megalodon tooth damage may have affected how the shark hunted and fed.

According to a previous study by Live Science, the megalodon was one of the largest predators. According to some estimations, its length ranges from at least 50 feet (15 meters) to as much as 65 feet (20 meters). To put that into perspective, the largest current great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) rarely exceed a length of six meters or twenty feet.

Although the megalodon thriller "The Meg" (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2018) suggested that solitary megalodons could still be hiding in the ocean's depths, most megalodon fossils date back to approximately 15 million years ago. All evidence of the giant sharks vanished from the fossil record after they became extinct approximately 2.6 million years ago.

Because sharks have skeletons constructed of cartilage rather than bone, which is often less stable than bone and less likely to fossilize properly, the majority of the megalodon fossils that have survived to the current day are teeth. Much like current sharks, the megalodon was continuously shedding its teeth and sprouting new ones, and it had a supply of teeth that was constantly replenishing itself in its jaws. Haviv Avrahami, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and a co-author of the study, told Live Science in an email that certain species of sharks can lose and replace tens of thousands of teeth throughout their lifetime's thanks to a system that has been dubbed the "tooth conveyer belt."

Avrahami commented that it would be the equivalent of losing twenty primary teeth every month.

The researchers spent a significant amount of time poring over hundreds of fossil shark teeth housed in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences collection in Raleigh. Their goal was to determine what would have caused the fracture in the megalodon tooth. They found only two more examples of the unusual split-tooth deformity: two teeth from the bull shark Carcharhinus leucas, a species that lived alongside megalodon millions of years ago (but was much smaller, reaching a maximum body length of around 12 feet, or 3.7 m), and is still around today. The megalodon was extinct millions of years ago.

They took measurements of the abnormal teeth and compared them to the normal teeth of the two species of sharks. After that, they performed computed X-ray tomography scans, also known as CT scans, to map the pulp cavities in the bull shark teeth and the vascular networks inside the megalodon teeth to determine how the abnormalities may have arisen.

Based on where the pulp cavities and networks separated "and the lack of substantial root anomalies" in all of the double teeth, their analysis revealed that germination was more likely than fusion to have produced them. This was the conclusion reached by the researchers in the study. According to the researchers' findings, the split teeth were extremely symmetrical, which would not have been the case if they had resulted from the merger of two tooth buds in various stages of development.

The meat and potatoes of the situation

According to Avrahami's explanation, the most likely origin of the pathology was traumatic damage to the tooth bud induced by a stab wound. This is more likely to have been the case than disease or infection, both of which sharks normally shrug off. "Sharks are strange in that it appears that they are especially resistant to becoming ill with illnesses," he said. "Sharks are peculiar." He continued by saying that because of this, "additional tooth malformations in sharks are regarded to be more likely related to trauma." The modern bull shark is known to feed on spiky prey that can cause such injuries, including sawfish, rays, and sea urchins. Even though the megalodon is thought to have preyed primarily on marine mammals—and possibly fish and turtles—its diet may have been more diverse than expected, including sea life-bearing pointy defensive weapons.

The megalodon had over 300 teeth in its mouth, so the loss of a single tooth was probably not a major concern. However, if the tooth bud had been wounded by a barb or spine that had subsequently become lodged in the huge shark's jaw, "it most likely would have caused the animal a tremendous amount of agony, possibly making it more difficult for it to hunt," Avrahami pointed out.

The closer examination of megalodon teeth in this study not only provides new information regarding dental abnormalities in sharks but also raises questions regarding the prevalence of double-tooth pathologies in other animal lineages that also had continuous tooth replacement, such as dinosaurs (including toothed birds) and crocodilians, as stated by Avrahami.

In my life, I've seen a lot of hadrosaur teeth, which are dinosaurs that also have huge tooth battery conveyor belts, but not a single one of them had the appearance of having two teeth stacked on top of each other. "Why?" he inquired. Therefore, I sincerely wish further research will be conducted on this topic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Article source : https://www.livescience.com/megalodon-toothache

Image source :  https://pixabay.com/id/photos/sirip-hiu-hiu-sirip-laut-ikan-air-472685/

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