The Meg: Is the Megalodon real? Does a shark three times bigger than Great White exist?

The Meg features a ferocious, massive, prehistoric shark long thought extinct coming up to the surface to torture surfers, sailors, and swimmers alike.

Until Jason Statham arrives, that is.

But moviegoers are curious as to whether the giant shark is based on a real creature, and if so, does that creature still exist?

The answer to the first question is yes, the Megalodon was real.

The shark, whose name means big tooth, lived approximately 23 to 2.6 million years ago, during the Early Miocene to the end of the Pliocene.

While initially thought to belong to the Great White Shark family, now a near-unanimous consensus within the scientific community states it belongs to the extinct family Otodontidae, which diverged from the ancestry of the great white shark during the Early Cretaceous.

Could the creature still exist?

The answer here is a hard no.

The curator of vertebrate paleobiology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington Hans Sues spoke to Science on the subject.

When asked if the Meg could have evaded extinction by living and hiding at the bottom of the ocean he said: “No way. That would be absolutely impossible and goes against everything we know about megalodons based on the fossil record.”

The shark’s survival in The Meg was predicated on a warm ecosystem under a cloud of hydrogen but Sues debunked this too.

Such a thing does not exist, and on top of this, Sues explained how a pocket of warm water beneath a hydrogen cloud “would be lethal to anything that would go through it.”

Not only is their survival impossible, Sues went on to say even if they had survived, humans would most certainly know.

“We’ve mapped the seafloor and have such advanced sensing technology. We would know if they were there,” he added.

The Meg is not the first outing for the massive shark in cinema.

The History Channel’s Jurassic Fight Club portrays a megalodon on a rampage in Japan, while movies like Shark Attack 3: Megalodon and the Mega Shark series feature it heavily.

Despite our fascination with the creature, the megalodon is most certainly extinct. Swim easy.

The Meg is playing in cinemas now.