In 2019, Jalil Najafov, a shark photographer, filmmaker and conservationist, spotted the shark swimming close to his boat while exploring Mexico’s coastal waters with his friends.
Looking closer, they were shocked to see a giant bite mark…
I was very surprised, as I had never seen anything like it in my life,
Najafov told CNN.
The photographer dove into the ocean with his GoPro7 underwater camera to get a clear picture of the great white shark with the bite.
Unfortunately, Najafov lost the memory card that stored the shark footage, so he wasn’t able to share them until almost two years later.
I have been working with sharks and shark content for many years; I have a lot of experience in this profession,
continued explaining the conservationist.
I know for sure that when I see something weird, I’ve never seen a shark scar that big.
After sharing the image on Instagram, the mysterious bite led many netizens to speculate that it could have come from a megalodon, an ancient and massive species of shark that lived millions of years ago.
The megalodon is considered to be one of the largest and most powerful predators that ever lived, and some scientists believe it would look like a great white shark.
The most common fossils that archaeologists have found are those of prehistoric creatures’ teeth, which are larger than any shark’s teeth they have ever seen.
This implies that megalodon is much larger than any shark today. To understand the origin of the bites, Najafov asked Dr. Tristan Guttridge.
In excavations, researchers found more than 40 teeth of prehistoric species.
I would rule out mating probably due to position as the wound seems to have healed a bit and while mating scars can be unsightly they are more superficial than that,
said Dr. Guttridge, who leads the marine nonprofit Saving the Blue.
To me, the shape probably indicates a bite from another shark; seems a little extreme for defense but it’s a big shark in itself so it’s predation from another shark.
In turn, another researcher, Michael Domeier, believes that it is a matter of competitive aggression.
Enlarged image of the bite.
I keep hearing people (colleagues) describe this sort of thing as territorial aggression, but these highly migratory sharks don’t have a traditional territory,
Revealed Domeier.
But they do not tolerate conspecifics, except in the rare cases where there appears to be some social bond between certain individuals (documented in South Australia). That scar will heal to the point where it won’t be a good trademark.
Does megalodon exist?
Marine biologists believe that yes, megalodon is officially extinct. They ruled the oceans for 13 millennia before becoming extinct 2.6 million years ago.
Megalodons reached 18 meters in length and weighed 100 tons, feeding on whales and great white sharks during the Pliocene.
New research in January 2021 suggested that ancient creatures were around 2 meters when they emerged from the womb. This was the result of fossils and teeth found in oceans around the world.
One theory as to why sharks grew so big before birth is that they ate their siblings in the womb. Despite the fact that experts consider the species extinct, there have been several sightings around the world.
Fishermen in New South Wales claimed in 1918 that a huge shark ate their nets. A 1933 report claimed that a mysterious sea beast was sighted off the coast of French Polynesia.
In 2018, several inexplicable videos were posted online showing how the giant beast managed to survive the test of time.
One of the videos was recorded at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and appeared to show a giant shark roaming the sea floor.
And on May 27, 2021, a giant 16-foot shark boarded a cruise ship full of terrified tourists in the Atlantic, who compared them to a megalodon.
And to all these sightings we have to add that Trapman Bermagui, aka Jason, discovered a huge shark with its head bitten off in the waters off the coast of Sydney, Australia, not knowing what monster ate the rest of the body.
