A video reportedly of a Megalodon taken in the Mariana Trench has been making the rounds of Facebook once again. Lets look at the video and discuss.
Uploaded on Aug 4, 2010
Scientists were laying bait in the depths of the Marina Trench (the deepest part of the world) to view fish species down there. Ended up catching something on film, might be the Megalodon.
The Mariana Trench or Marianas Trench is the deepest part of the world’s oceans. It is located in the western Pacific Ocean, to the east of the Mariana Islands. The trench is about 2,550 kilometres (1,580 mi) long but has an average width of only 69 kilometres (43 mi). It reaches a maximum-known depth of 10.911 km. Since the discovery of the coelocanth in 1938, cryptid followers have held out hope that deep ocean trenches may harbor other relics of Earth’s prehistoric oceans, and they may yet. The bigger the better. The scarier the better. At 65 feet, Megalodon fits that bill to a “T.”
This video is a good example of several of the problems most exploited in proposed photos of the unexplained. Foremost, there is no reference for scale here. A clearly large shark moving slowly (which only adds to the illusion of great size) enters the shot and we are told it is huge, so we believe it is huge. Why wouldn’t it be? Right there is a perfect case of leading the reader, rather than informing them. But this video is taken so deep in the ocean (we presume, and I will get back to that) that no light penetrates. Things move slowly in the dark. Now, IF you notice, when the big shark enters another one actually bumps into it, so pretty clearly this is not an environment where eyesight comes much into play.
The second main problem is that no one can know every animal out there, especially deep ocean animals. If you watch carefully at the 00:45 mark of the video you will see the creature’s eye and that pretty clearly identifies this guy (or gal, I don’t really know how you tell with sharks, or why you would take the time to look) as a Pacific Sleeper Shark.
Here is the eye in the video
The Pacific sleeper shark, Somniosus pacificus, is found circumglobally on continental shelves and slopes in temperate waters from the surface to 2,000 metres (6,600 ft). Its length is up to 4.4 m (14 ft), although FishBase accepts that it could possibly reach lengths in excess of 7 m (23 ft). So, still plenty big, and maybe this is an example of a larger specimen than has been found before, and for that it bears some interest to science, but still not a Megalodon.
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