How are sharks and dinosaurs similar?
You may have heard that this week is Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, and while we’re super excited for it, we’ve also got our minds on an even cooler event happening on Aug. 15 – LSC After Dark: Wine-O-Saurs!
Our next LSC After Dark event is a prehistoric party, where guests 21+ get to dance with dinosaurs, enjoy wine tastings, and search for fossils in our outdoor summer exhibition, Dino Dig.
With Shark Week and LSC After Dark: Wine-O-Saurs happening so close to each other, it definitely got us thinking: how are sharks and dinosaurs similar, other than both being featured in some very popular Steven Spielberg movies?
Well, did you know that both dinosaurs and sharks have multiple rows of teeth that grow one behind the other to allow them to be replaced easily? Great white sharks replace all of their teeth once every 230 days, while the Tyrannosaurus rex replaced theirs once every two to three years.
You may also be interested to know that there was once an ancient, prehistoric shark called the Megalodon. One of the fiercest and largest predators ever to live, the Megalodon was 60 feet long, 12 feet tall, and weighed 60 tons.
New research shows that the Megalodon actually went extinct 3.6 million years ago, rather than 2.6 million years ago as previously thought. This led scientists to look into factors that could have caused the extinction of the Megalodon – and they found that it was the rise of the great white shark!
Great white sharks evolved into having serrated teeth 6 million years ago and then spread globally 4 million years ago. When the whale population started dying out 4 million years ago, the Megalodon had to compete with the great white sharks for smaller prey like seals. This was difficult for the Megalodon, because they could only swim up to 15 mph while the great white shark can swim up to 35 mph.
This competition caused a decline in population of the Megalodon, ultimately leading to their extinction.
We hope you join us Aug. 15 for LSC After Dark: Wine-O-Saurs, where you can learn more about prehistoric creatures like the Megalodon.
If you’re not 21+, don’t worry! You can join us every day out back in Dino Dig, here at LSC through Sept. 2, 2019.
