The whale escaped, but not unscathed.
About 15 million years ago in a warm coastal sea covering what is now southern Maryland, the ocean surface suddenly erupted in a violent upheaval as a shark the size of a five-story building — the mighty and massive megalodon — launched itself at a whale near the surface, clamping its 250 serrated teeth around the whale's midsection. As the struggling pair broke the surface in a bloody breach, the force of the attack bent the whale's back and caused a violent compression fracture.
"We only have circumstantial evidence, but it's damning circumstantial evidence," said Stephen J. Godfrey, a curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland and lead author of the study."This is how we see the story unfolding," Godfrey told Live Science."Although there are limitations to what we can claim, and we want the evidence to speak for itself.
"In terms of the fossils we've seen on Calvert Cliffs, this kind of injury is exceedingly rare," he said."The injury was so nasty, so clearly the result of serious trauma, that I wanted to know the backstory."Godfrey suspected that he might learn more by looking inside the damaged vertebrae with CT scans, and a local hospital offered to help assess the fossil with modern medical imaging techniques.
But Godfrey thinks a megalodon attack is the most plausible explanation. For one thing, there's the sheer magnitude of the trauma — one vertebra actually telescoped inward from the force of the other vertebra smashing into it."It's just so over the top in terms of the violence," Godfrey said, adding that it's hard to imagine any seizure or convulsion packing such a punch.
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