Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Megalodon
/ˈmɛɡələdɒn/noun
An extinct shark, far larger than the great white, known mainly from its teeth.
The Greek roots
μέγας
mégas
great, large
ὀδών
odṓn
tooth
Literally: “big tooth”
The story of the word
For centuries the triangular fossils were called glossopetrae, tongue stones, and taken for petrified snake or dragon tongues, until Nicolas Steno dissected a shark's head in 1666 and showed they were teeth. Louis Agassiz gave the giant one its species name in 1843. Teeth are nearly all we get, since a shark's skeleton is cartilage and rarely fossilises, so every estimate of the animal's length is built out of a triangle of enamel and an argument.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
mastodonorthodontistmegalithmegaphone
In a sentence
A megalodon tooth fills the palm of your hand with room to spare.
Documentaries keep resurrecting the megalodon, which has been gone for over three million years.