Megalodon went extinct 3.6 million years ago.
This sounds like a silly question, but I have heard many people say that there are, for example, “12 living megalodons in the Marianas Trench” (I did not make that up, someone actually said that). A 60-foot long shark would not go unnoticed for that long, and it ate whales. What is a giant like that going to do, eat marine snow, and tiny anglerfish for life?
One theory on why Megalodon went extinct was because of the ice age, and that Megalodon could not follow its prey into cold water.
This was proven wrong by the fact that Megalodon teeth are found in places that were cold as 1º! The two main reasons that scientists think Megalodon went extinct is because it had more new predators it had to compete with, such as carnivorous whales and a relative to the Great White Shark, Carcharodon Hubbelli, and the modern Great White, Carcharodon Carcharias. Another reason was that Megalodon’s main prey, whales, were on the decline, as the number of species shrunk from about 60 to 40, probably due to the drop in diatoms. Now with less food, Megalodon would have to compete even harder than before with the faster Great White.
This means that now Megalodon was just slower, bulkier, and needed to eat more, and this is probably why they went extinct.
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