Randy Flores, a UCLA doctoral student who worked on the study, said analyzing this material allows you to see what conditions were like in the animal when the teeth were growing.

“Maintaining an energy level that would allow for a megalodon’s elevated body temperature would require a voracious appetite that may not have been sustainable at a time of shifting marine ecosystem balances when it may even have to compete with newcomers like the great white shark,” he said. said.

Megalodons, thought to have reached lengths of up to 15 meters, belonged to a group of sharks called mako sharks.

Members of that group today include the great white shark and the thresher shark.

Mako sharks keep the temperature of all or parts of their bodies slightly warmer than the water around them, but the megalodon is an extreme example that the team says should be categorized as “warm-blooded.”

The heat generated by their muscles is stored by sharks, making them different from fully warm-blooded or endothermic animals such as mammals that independently generate their own heat. Mako sharks do not make heat, but they retain it well.