Big, Bad & Very, Very Toothy: A Shark’s Tale

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal

Megalodon lived. Past tense. The largest shark ever, and arguably the largest predator, went extinct 2.6 million or more years ago. And it has stayed that way. But Hollywood sequel makers will be pleased to know that megalodon still somehow manages to kill on average two people a year, according to Tim and Emma Flannery. More on that later.

In “Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator That Ever Lived,” the Flannerys, a father-and-daughter pair of Australian scientists, provide a more complete and accurate picture of megalodon than you are likely to see on any television or movie screen. The authors tell us, among other things, that megalodon had nurseries in parts of what are now Maryland, South Carolina and Florida; that it was warm-blooded; and that its young were more than 6 feet long at birth. Like some modern sharks, but on a grander scale, megalodon practiced intrauterine cannibalism, and only the strong emerged to see the outside world. The adult megalodon, the Flannerys write, was big enough to be the scourge of the seas and an “emblem of all the unspoken, hidden terrors that haunt our imaginations.”

Just how big? Was it 50 feet long? Or maybe 65? The book is vague on such details for good reason. Not only does megalodon not exist in the modern world; there is also hardly any fossil evidence, apart from its teeth, that it ever existed. Megalodon’s massive body was built on cartilage, not bone, and cartilage does not fossilize well. The Flannerys hold out hope that a “whole-body” megalodon fossil might someday turn up, a result of extraordinary circumstances of preservation. It happened in 2017 for a contemporary, the giant mackerel shark, an extinct ancestor of today’s great white shark. But the lack so far of anything comparable for megalodon means that the Flannerys must often resort to “mights,” “maybes” and “just imagines.”

About megalodon teeth, their account is sharply detailed. Megalodon’s mouth contained about 272 of them, arranged in four rows, rotating forward as the front teeth broke off in heavy use. And heavy use is what they got. Whales were their common prey, according to the Flannerys, and megalodon’s mouth was big enough “to swallow an orca whole.” Biting and shaking its way through such massive prey, a single shark could shed tens of thousands of teeth over its centurylong life. Unlike its cartilaginous skeleton, its arrowhead-shaped teeth were made of unusually hard material and remain scattered abundantly across the planet.

Pining for Winter in New England

Roaring Brook Number 2, which deserves a better name. (Photo: Richard Conniff)

by Richard Conniff

It’s a dreary Sunday dawn here in Connecticut, 38 degrees (about 3 degrees Celsius), with rain pouring down, as it has been pouring down for much of the week. In a better world, at this time of year, that rain would have grown up to be snow and to lie for weeks two- or three-feet deep across the frozen countryside. Not now, though. It’s too warm. Like much of New England, I am yearning for winter, which hardly seems to exist hereabouts anymore. 

Last Sunday we got a brief tantalizing taste. Maybe two inches of fresh snow on the ground and the temperature just 26 degrees (-3 C) at midday. I put on my winter jacket for the first time this season and went out with my dog for a walk in the woods. It was glorious. First of all the sound of the snow underfoot, the steady heel-toe crunch of the thin layer of snow on top, and the frozen leaves below. Then the exhilarating sting of cold air on the face.

Scene of the crime (Photo: RC)

The dog led me off the trail to a fresh kill, and because of the contrast with the snow underneath, everything was plainly visible. (I was too busy keeping Jack from scoffing up the bloody remnants to examine it closely. But you can perhaps do your own forensic analysis in these photos.) I liked the reminder of other creatures, predator and prey, trying to eke out their lives here in these woods.

Things that were still among the living also left their marks, like these turkey tracks, in the snow.

Down by the stream that runs through the area, a thin memory of ice had begun to creep out from the shoreline. (See the photo at the top.) But it would go no farther. The stream runs too fast now with its load of runoff. (I was going to say snow melt, but past and future rains were more of a force.) 

The whole experience reminded me of winter hikes I used to go on 60 years ago as a boy in New Jersey’s Ramapo Mountains, tromping in galoshes with my friends through two feet of snow and pretending to be Leni Lenape Indians. My 10-year-old self would undoubtedly scoff at an old fool being thrilled by a hike through the modern, short-lived, two-inch-thick counterpart. But I was thrilled. 

A Toothy Answer to The Problem of Feral Pigs

It happened at the Tejon Ranch in California, and a camera trap caught the action:

Tyrannosaurs: It’s Not Just About Rex

by Richard Conniff/Wall Street Journal

Given that tyrannosaurs are the most studied of all dinosaurs, and familiar to almost everyone above the age of 5 (or maybe make that 3), it’s extraordinary how little we really know about them: huge bodies, big spiky teeth, tiny arms, scary as hell. That’s about it for most of us.

Go a little deeper and we mostly go wrong, according to David Hone, a paleontologist at the University of London. “Tyrannosaurs,” he writes, in “The Tyrannosaur Chronicles,” “were not pure scavengers; they didn’t spend their lives battling adult Triceratops, they did not have poor eyesight, they could not run at 50 km/h, females were not bigger than males,” and they weren’t all Tyrannosaurus rex, that flesh-rending, scenery-chomping, lunkheaded box-office giant of our nightmares.

Mr. Hone’s unsensational and resolutely middle-of-the-road account lists 29 tyrannosaur species. He adds that

Animal Music Monday: “The Fox Went Out”

Nickel Creek performing “The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night”

by Richard Conniff

I mostly recall this carnivore’s delight from the Burl Ives version of 1956. But my father also used to sing it to us when we were small. One of my sisters remembers: “Dad once picked my up and threw me over his shoulder while that song was on, imitating the fox who flings the grey goose over his back. I was probably five years old and was wearing a skirt, which flew over my head, and was not amused. Other than that, it’s a fine song, an old folk song.” She played it for her kids in turn.

The idea of a freshly killed duck or goose “greasing” anybody’s chin has an earthiness that might trouble the modern sensitivity police. (But what do I know about sensitivity?  I used to sing my kids “Weile Weile Waila,” an Irish song about a woman who sticks a knife in a baby’s head.)  Versions of “The Fox” date back to 1500, and it has no doubt been sung around the barnyard by every generation since.

I love the calamitous mouthful of this stanza:

Animal Music Monday: “Piggies”

George Harrison wrote the original “Piggies” for The Beatles White Album, released on November 22, 1968.  But I ran across this interesting instrumental cover from 2015 on YouTube.  If the tune were not so familiar, you might mistake it for a pretty bit of folk music from the early baroque era:

I asked a musician friend to comment.  He performs baroque and Renaissance music and, as it happened, had never heard the original Beatles tune. So he listened with an unbiased ear:

“This track started (and concluded, as well) as a completely convincing piece of Italian or Iberian music from the 17th century, in the spirit of Ucellini or Merula or dozens of others. Other than a few goofy chords in the bridge, there is little to give away that it is anything else. Unfortunately, it devolves in the middle section to a more diffuse “pan-Baroque” feel; just kind of a tacky pastiche. But aside from that, a pretty convincing articulation that “popular” music is kind of timeless and has been built on the same idioms and practices for centuries.”

Harrison intended the song as a harmless satire on the grubby, self-serving ways of the rich. According to Song Facts, he originally wrote one verse that was dropped from the final recording but resonates in a post-2008 world:

Everywhere there’s lots of piggies playing piggie pranks
You can see them on their trotters
At the piggy banks
Paying piggy thanks
To thee pig brother.”

The song produced one appalling response: Though it’s better known that 

Leopard Stalks Steenbok at Kruger

Turn off the sound on this one.  Too much microphone wind.  Or just don’t watch if you are a Friend of Bambi.

Killing Dinner with Your Own Hands

I’ve only done it with fish and lobster, but according to today’s New York Times, killing your own dinner is now a foodist movement. Here’s the lead of the story by Kate Murphy:

COULD you look through a rifle’s scope into the long-lashed eyes of an elk and pull the trigger if it would be the only meat you ate for the year? Would your conscience be more or less troubled if instead you slit the necks of animals you planned to eat after they were nurtured like adored pets on an idyllic farm?

Does the thought of doing either send you to the grocery store or farmers’ market, where neat packages conceal the violence committed on your behalf? Or do you forswear meat altogether?

While the morality of our meals is not a new debate, the polemics have reached a shrill intensity lately as a growing number of people, in an effort to raise their culinary consciousness, have committed to eating only meat they kill themselves. They are unapologetic, although not necessarily unflinching, about the blood on their hands. And they are the latest dietary tribe in our increasingly Balkanized food culture where people align with those who consume as they do and question the emotional, spiritual and intellectual capacities of those who don’t.

Read the whole article here. But I particularly like this bit. It is so gratifying to have deep thinkers to sort out the moral implications of what we eat:

Nor can you treat all meat eaters as savages, said Mr. Sarnecki, who writes and teaches on food ethics. “It might not be morally problematic to eat lobsters because they likely don’t conceptualize the world at all, whereas you might feel differently if the animal were a mammal that probably has a higher level of consciousness,” he said, duly noting, “I draw the line at lobsters because they are delicious.”

CSI (and a Poison Pill) for Cats that Kill

One of Australia’s 15 million feral cats at work on a native marsupial, the phascogale

Domestic cats have become notorious in recent years as one of the most destructive invasive species on the planet, now threatening dozens of bird and mammal species with extinction. (That’s on top of the 30 or so species they have already eradicated.) When conservationists are trying to restore a threatened species to its old habitats, a single murderous cat can be enough to destroy the entire project.

Now frustrated scientists in Australia are proposing to apply criminal forensics and even a poison pill to identify and eliminate problem cats—and possibly spare other cats that are innocent of the killing. In a new study in the journal Biological Conservation, they call these experimental techniques “predator profiling.”

A team of researchers led by ecologist Katherine Moseby at the University of Adelaide looked at restoration attempts for what they call “challenging species.” That generally means mammals that are big enough, toothy enough, or just plain mean enough that you might not think the average outdoor cat

Eagle Says F–k Drones. Skies Now All Clear

The hero here is an Australian wedge-tailed eagle, reclaiming the skies for All Birdom (and especially for the ones that are edible)