Otodus

Otodus is a genus of giant shark that lived during the Cenozoic era in the Paleocene to Pliocene epoch, between 65 to 3.6 milions years ago. It lived at the same time and place as sea-dwelling mammals, which were its favorite prey options. It was a predator in its own right, and one of the largest sharks ever.^[2]

Otodus was been named by Louis Agassiz in 1843, and the types species was been named as Lamna obliqua, but years later it was renamed.^[2][3] Most other species of the genus Otodus were first classified in the genus Carcharodon, as is the case with the best-known species, Carcharodon megalodon. Paleontologists placed the Megalodon lineage as an ancestral lineage of the modern Great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) between the 19th and early 20th centuries.

However, more recent studies reject this classification, proposing the genus Carcharocles or Otodus, of the family Otodontidae, as a separate family. Paleontologist H. Cappeta in 1974 aligned O. obliquus in the megalodon lineage, creating an evolutionary line: O. obliquus - C. auriculatus - C. sokolovi - C. angustidens - C. chubutensis and finally to Megalodon in the Neogene.^[3][4]

Otodus had a lot of prey options, ranging from whales, to mammals who spent their lives in water.^[5]

A recently described, well-known fossil shows that a shark of the genus Otodus attacked an extinct sperm whale similar to the genus Acrophyseter. Paleontologists say the animal was likely an O. chubutensis or an O. megalodon. The predator attacked its victim in the face. This indicates that a possible O. chubutensis or Megalodon targeted its prey's face to inflict a fatal bite on the skull.^[6][7][8]

Otodus It has a cosmopolitan distribution, its fossils have been found in the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia and others.