Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator that Ever Lived

Also by Tim Flannery

Mammals of New Guinea

Tree Kangaroos: A Curious Natural History with R. Martin, P. Schouten and A. Szalay

The Future Eaters

Possums of the World: a Monograph of the Phalangeroidea with P. Schouten

Mammals of the South West Pacific and Moluccan Islands

Watkin Tench, 1788 (ed.)

John Nicol, Life and Adventures 1776–1801 (ed.)

Throwim Way Leg: An Adventure

The Explorers (ed.)

The Birth of Sydney (ed.)

Terra Australis: Matthew Flinders’ Great Adventures in the Circumnavigation of Australia (ed.)

The Eternal Frontier

A Gap in Nature with P. Schouten

John Morgan, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley (ed.)

The Birth of Melbourne (ed.)

Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World (ed.)

Astonishing Animals with P. Schouten

Country

The Weather Makers

We Are the Weather Makers

An Explorer’s Notebook

Here on Earth

Among the Islands

The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish

Atmosphere of Hope

Sunlight and Seaweed

Europe

Life

The Climate Cure

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2023 by Tim Flannery and Emma Flannery

Jacket design by Becca Fox Design

Jacket front illustration by Kathi Mirto based on original artwork by Patrick O’Neill, used with permission from Encyclopædia Britannica, © 2018 by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; back photograph © Heritage Auctions, HA.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

First published in Australia in 2023 by the Text Publishing Company

Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic hardcover editon: February 2024

Typeset by J&M Typesetting

ISBN 978-0-8021-6258-8

eISBN 978-0-8021-6259-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

Contents

CHAPTER 1: The Discovery

CHAPTER 2: The Megalodon

CHAPTER 3: Origins: The Evolution of Sharks

CHAPTER 4: The Miocene: The Megalodon’s Heyday

CHAPTER 5: Extinction

CHAPTER 6: Charms, Tools and Jewels

CHAPTER 7: The Sweating Teeth of Malta

CHAPTER 8: The Don of Megalodons

CHAPTER 9: Where the Beautiful Megs Lie

CHAPTER 10: Shark Eats Man

CHAPTER 11: Man Eats Shark

CHAPTER 12: The Imaginary Meg

Photo Insert

References

Index

To Dr Tom Rich, my lifelong mentor

TF

To my wonderful dad, for making this life

one of hope and adventure

EF

CHAPTER 1

The Discovery

When I was sixteen I found something that changed my life. It was 1973, the wettest year then recorded in Australia, and the desert heart of the continent was transformed into an inland sea. Cooper Creek and the Warburton River flowed like the Mississippi, and Lake Eyre, usually a vast dry salt pan, filled with freshwater, with pelicans and with other aquatic life. In my home state of Victoria, floods ripped through the landscape, carrying away soil and crops and livestock, leaving behind fields of debris and rubble. In those days I was a keen fossil hunter, and I knew that the floods might unearth hidden treasures last seen when Earth was a younger and different place.

My favourite fossil-hunting grounds were in western Victoria. There, the floods had been monumental and merciless, destroying houses, farms and sheds and carrying off countless flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. It was a bright summer day when I made my great discovery. The floods had subsided, leaving the creek I was prospecting scoured and filled with pebbly shoals. I was walking along the bank when I saw, in shallow water, a large, triangular shape nestled among the pebbles. I scampered down the slope and picked it up. As if in a dream, I realised that I was holding a huge tooth. I knew instantly what it was. I had read about such things, and even seen examples in museums. But I never dreamed that I’d be fortunate enough to find one. This tooth had once been in the mouth of a shark known as Otodus megalodon, the largest predator that ever lived, a mighty species that had been extinct for millions of years! The fossil was large enough to cover my palm. Its silken chestnut-brown enamel shone brilliantly in the sunshine. So magical did it appear that I handled it gently, not daring to put it down in case it disappeared.

Years later when I visited that creek, I discovered the partial skeleton of a whale eroding from the bank just upstream from where I made my find. I knew that the megalodon preyed on whales, and I suspect that the flood had ripped my tooth from the sediment around the skeleton, where it had been dropped as the shark tore into its prey. Courtesy of volcanic activity, which had elevated the entire region, the site was now well inland—a hundred kilo­metres from the sea. It was dizzying to think that 10 million years ago the largest predator ever to exist had swum where I then walked.

I still have that great tooth. It’s my talisman of time travel and one of my most treasured possessions. I’ve spent countless hours, tracing its fate from the moment it fell from the shark’s mouth to the moment, half a century ago, when I spotted it in the creek bed. In my mind’s eye I see the tooth tumbling from the shark’s mouth as it crunched down on the carcass of the whale, before sashaying through the water and falling to the bottom. A rain of sandy sediment, mostly formed from the bodies of dead sea creatures, buried it many metres deep. Millions of years later a volcano spewed out a lava flow, sealing its stony tomb. Groundwater carried phosphate and other minerals from the sediment into the enamel of the tooth, staining it a rich chestnut brown. Eventually volcanism elevated the rocks, and a drying climate created the characteristic woodlands of the volcanic plains in Victoria’s Western District. In time, a creek cut into the land, first eroding through the lava, then cutting into the sediments that held the fossil. The most subtle of topographic variation must have guided the creek as it excavated its valley ever deeper into the rock, until by pure fluke it cut into the sediment where the tooth lay. In 1973 a raging flood unearthed the fossil, exposing it to daylight for the first time in 10 million years, damaging it slightly in the process, and deposited it on the pebble bank where I found it. The chances of me ever encountering that megalodon tooth are so fantastically small that it has come to symbolise, for me, immense good fortune.

A couple of years after I made that find I finished high school. I was then nearly eighteen, and a long summer holiday beckoned. Most of my mates would spend it surfing or chasing girls. But I was going to hunt fossils, mostly by snorkelling or scuba-diving off a rocky beach at Beaumaris, a few kilometres from my home in suburban Melbourne. The fossil deposits there, which are around six million years old, crop out on the bed of Port Phillip Bay in a few metres of water. I had stumbled across them a decade earlier, when I was eight, and over the years had found hundreds of fossilised sharks’ teeth there, as well as the bones of many other kinds of extinct marine creatures. I used to bring them to the curator of fossils at the Museum of Victoria, Dr Tom Rich, who hoped that I’d find remains from smaller mammals, such as seals or marsupials whose carcasses had been swept out to sea and become buried in the sediments.

Tom became one of the most important people in my life. He saw that I had the potential to become a palaeontologist and encouraged me to pursue higher studies. He also took me on field trips to remote regions of Australia, where he showed me the art of palaeontology—everything from how to encase a delicate fossil in a plaster jacket to how to sort and identify fossils. These are skills you don’t learn in the classroom. They can only be acquired through a sort of apprenticeship, and I became Tom’s eager apprentice. Perhaps the most important lesson he taught me was patience. ‘You have to have the will to fail’ he’d say to me whenever the fossils became thin on the ground and I started to lose interest.

One of the most important discoveries I had made at Beaumaris was the articulated backbone of an extinct seal. It was then the oldest seal fossil ever found in Australia, and Tom reckoned that the rest of the skeleton must be out there somewhere. Indeed, so convinced was he that he offered to pay me the then princely sum of $500 to search for it over that summer. I was delighted to take up Tom’s offer. In fact I would gladly have spent the summer diving at Beaumaris without any pay. Apart from being a mad-keen fossil hunter, I loved exploring the marine environment with its many species of fish and starfish and other invertebrates. The only stipulation Tom made on the deal was that I must hand over every fossil I found, whether of a seal or any other creature.

On my very first day on the job—in fact just a few minutes after I had slipped into the shallows—I saw, lying before me on the sea floor, a perfect megalodon tooth. It was even larger than my first find, and it was more complete. Its enamel was lustrous, glossy green in colour, and as I floated in the sunny water above it shone from its bed of sand with an uncanny brilliance. I’d been scanning that area for years, and must have swum right over it dozens of times. But now a current had washed some sand away, or perhaps a storm had dislodged a stone that had obscured the great tooth, and there it lay in all its beauty, like an expensive necklace in a jeweller’s window.

I dived down, picked it up, and placed it in the linen bag I carried for my finds. I took it home and put it on the shelf in my bedroom with my other treasures, which included a fossilised whale vertebra and the teeth of lesser sharks. Like a prince among paupers, it outshone them all. That evening I lay in bed, admiring it, and struggling with a moral dilemma of monumental proportions. Under the terms of my agreement, the tooth belonged to Tom Rich and the museum. But nobody would know if I kept it. I could always say that I had found it before or after my period of employment. The trouble with that idea was that I would know. That night, as I struggled with what to do, I dreamed of walking over beaches paved with perfect megalodon teeth. So many that I could not pick them all up. When I awoke, overcome with a special kind of sadness I’d never known before or since, I knew what I had to do. I’d board the train to the city, and hand my megalodon tooth over to Dr Rich. It could, I realised, be mine only for this one night.

I arrived at the museum as self-importantly as if I were bearing the Rosetta Stone or the Nefertiti bust and was expecting gasps of astonishment or whoops of joy from Dr Rich. But when I revealed my treasure, Tom barely noticed. I was wounded at the casual way he took the tooth from my hands, as if it were a mere trinket. Dr Rich, I had forgotten, was not interested in the fossils of sharks. He wanted fossils of seals. In a teenage mood somewhere between crestfallen and resentful, I stomped away.

From the moment I left Dr Rich’s office that morning, I didn’t see that tooth again for more than 40 years. Yet it filled my daydreams, and my dreams. My university textbooks became filled with doodles of fossil shark teeth, and in my dreams I often found myself walking along a sea wall, above dozens of fossilised megalodon teeth, so many that they spilled from my hands. I would invariably wake up after such dreams feeling happy and wealthy beyond measure.

On my fiftieth birthday, I decided to give myself a pres­ent. I was then director of the South Australian Museum whose shop had a few megalodon teeth from North America. I purchased one that had been found in a river in South Carolina. It cost me $1500, and I valued it. But it could never, at least in my mind, be as significant as the tooth I had found all those years ago.

Over the years Tom and I have remained very close, and I often visited him at the Museum of Victoria. But it was not until 2019 that I asked to see the beautiful megalodon tooth I’d handed over 41 years earlier. I don’t know why it took me so long to muster the will to do so. But I felt a compulsion to know whether the great tooth was as large and glorious in reality as it was in my memory. A good friend, Dr Erich Fitzgerald, was by that time the curator in charge of marine vertebrate fossils at the museum. He took me into the collection and opened a drawer filled with the teeth of megalodon sharks found at Beaumaris. Most had been collected during the 19th Century, when the sea floor must have been littered with such treasures, just as it was in my dreams.

The fossil bed at Beaumaris has been eroding away for thousands of years, exposing a rich variety of fossil bones and teeth. The fossils are far harder than the stone that encloses them and can be so abundant as to form a kind of pavement of bones, stones and other remnants. During the ice ages the waters of Port Phillip Bay drained away and the place was a plain. Back then, during the freezing days and nights, the fossils must have lain among the roots of grasses and snow gums and been trod on by diprotodons and other giant marsupials. When the Earth warmed and the waters rose, the fossils once more became part of the bed