How’s this for scary. For thousands of years people had found great
big, almost perfectly triangular white stones, about the size of a
hand, and not known from whence they came. Speculation went with the
times. They’re petrified tongues of dragons, they’re from the moon,
God done it, usual stuff.

But what they in fact were is teeth. Can you say ‘were… is’? Who
cares. Not just any teeth but those from a shark. But teeth the size
of a hand??? Oh yeah, its quite a big shark. In fact its not. Great
Whites are ‘quite big sharks’, up to 20 feet long. These teeth came
from a 60 foot long Megalodon, errr, shark.

Unfortunately (???) they became extinct. About 2.5 million years ago.
Shame. Otherwise the shores of Australia would be full of them. Not
that the megalodon inhabited the Pacific specifically, but all really
dangerous creatures seem to be drawn to the Antipodes. Normal sharks,
box jellyfish, snakes and spiders, rugby players. What kind of shark
net would make you feel safe when the predator has about a 12 foot
jaw-span? Answer: fucking massive ones made of reinforced concrete.

They reckon there was some kind of mass extinction. Which happens.
Like when the dinosaurs died out almost completely because of a
meteoric impact in Mexico. Which killed off the vegetation, which
killed off the herbivores, leaving the poor carnivores nothing to eat.
The sun was obscured for 5 years so only the weeny little (previously)
insignificant, barely-a-snack sized mammals survived. And one minute
you have a mouse or a cat, and just a few million years on they became
my great-great-great-great…great-great grandfather, Schlomo ben
Yehuda ha-Cohen. Though I prefer to imagine my family evolved directly
from sloths and didn’t need to adapt so much afterwards.

This extinction was less dramatic. But a Megalodon is gonna have a
healthy apetite. 60 feet of it. And they reckon that something
happened which massively reduced the number of aquatic mammals upon
which he dined. Also lots of turtles, again, BIG ones, became extinct
at the same time. Hmmmmm. They think the sea waters may have receded
for some as yet unknown reason. But I reckon it was those American
carnivores fucking up the atmosphere with carbon and pollutants. The
antecedents of Donald Trump were in fact bottom-feeders, but drove
Cadillacs. Its the only answer.

Happy evolution

A xxxx