Warm-bloodedness may have been a double-edged sword for O. megalodon.
. Climate change during the Pliocene Epoch, which spanned 5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago, led to a collapse in the population of marine mammals, the primary food source for both sharks.probably had a lower requirement for food to maintain its metabolic rate.”
To get more direct evidence of the body temperatures of these shark species, and therefore better understand their respective metabolisms, the team turned to the only fossils the sharks have left behind: their teeth. Fossilized teeth offer a wealth of encapsulated environmental data. The tooth enamel contains both heavier and lighter forms, or isotopes, of carbon, oxygen and other elements, and the relative abundances of these isotopes is linked to body temperature. Eagle and his colleagues used a technique that examines the abundance of “clumped isotopes” — bonded-together heavy forms of carbon and oxygen — as a kind of ancient geochemical thermometer.
The team used this technique on teeth from the different sharks, as well as fossil samples from other ancient ocean contemporaries including whales and mollusks. . The data show that both sharks were a bit endothermic, but not only was ’s average body temperature higher than its surrounding waters, it was also higher than the average body temperature of great whites living in similar waters.
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