Meg Madness Mounts: Now The Video
Posted by: Loren Coleman on February 13th, 2007
Is it MEG?
The above Japanese video is vaguely labeled as if this might be a recording of Carcharodon megalodon. Of course, it could be any number of large sharks, including a whale shark.
With the reports from Australia of “monster” sharks, no matter what size they are, it is clear that the curious interest in cryptid Megalodons is easily ignited.
Carcharodon megalodon, the 70 foot, 40 ton prehistoric cousin of the great white shark, rises from the abyss in the forthcoming movie Meg, and people can hardly wait.
“Meg Madness,” if I may, will continue to mount, as the anticipated making and release of the movie based on Steve Alten’s book, Meg, goes forward. The movie was held back by New Line Cinema who were busy working on Rush Hour 3 (2007).
According to Alten, the Meg motion picture, if all the funding comes through, probably will be released during North America’s “2008 Summer Blockbuster” window (May – July). Look for some exciting Hollywood graphics promoting the movie in about a year.
Scheduled to be the director is Jan de Bont, who steered to success such films as Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003), The Haunting (1999), Speed 2: Cruise Control(1997), Twister (1996), and Speed (1994).
The Meg screenwriter is Shane Salerno, who just finished Alien vs. Predator: AVP2 (2007), which is in post-production. Salerno was also responsible for the screenplay adaptation of the Bruce Willis-Ben Affleck movie, Armageddon (1998).
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
A good number of people have identified said shark as a Pacific sleeper shark.
The shark in the video seems pretty sluggish. Was not C. megalodon suppose to be a powerful open water cruiser, much like the great white?
I have known about this idea of a movie since 2002 when i visited Steve’s website. Shark Attack 3 was a big rip off of steve’s book which was based on a similar Megoldon shark.. Same type of story and all that. Kinda disappointed about that movie though.
This shark is without any doubt a sleeper shark, and as a result of forced perspective, it looks much larger than it actually is. The true length of this big shark in the video is “only” about 6-7m, making it as large as the largest known great whites. Furthermore Megalodon was not th 70 feet monster you can still sometimes read. The largest known teeth belonged to a specimen of about 16m, and in average they were smaller, somewhere between 12 and 14m.
It seems to lose a bit of size when you compare it to the relatively small chimaera fish.
This video is indeed quite old now, it was identified by many and accepted by most to be, as already stated in another post here a ‘pacific – sleeper’.
I still think the video is great though. I first saw it a couple of years ago.
Wasn’t Megalodon a shallow water shark?
Yes, of course, it is appears to a Pacific sleeper shark (Somniosus pacificus), from a clip posted a few months ago. But people are talking about it now.
Don’t be distracted by identifying the species.
The point is the label on the YouTube video – “Megalodon” – and the new wave of steamroller popular culture Meg phenomena, which is presently occurring.
The environment for the studio support of the Meg movie clearly is there, in the context of a year of “new species” being found in several ocean settings.
That’s the essence to this blog.
Whatever it was, given the record of Japanese scientists lately (with the giant squid and the frilled shark), I’m surprised they didn’t kill it.
Hmmm, I wonder how it tasted?
It sounds dumb.
Shark movies are old hat, there’s very little you can do with them to make them interesting now the public are on the side of the fish.
(and who wouldn’t be, a fish that has few bones to stick in your mouth.)
I remember the account of a US soldier in Nicaragua in the 70s, they were wading a river, and his friend was grabbed and pulled under by a shark. He said “100 miles from the sea, he was killed by a shark; why weren’t we warned about this?”
(BTW, isn’t the smallest shark species from Japan? cant recall its name though)
Loren is using the old genus name for Megalodon, which marks it as a close relative of the Great White, Charcharodon charcharias. Recent research indicates that despite the similarity in the teeth (Likely an example of convergent evolution), Meg would have been much more closely related to the Sand Tiger Shark, Odontaspis taurus. Thus, Meg was recently given the new genus name of Charcharocles.
To answer Richard From Idaho, juvenile Megalodons were shallow water predators, likely feeding mostly off of seals and Odobenocetops, a walrus-like dolphin. When they matured, they moved into deeper waters to feed on whales.
Responding to Tengu’s question, the Pygmy Ribbontail Catshark (Eridacnis radcliffei), is generally believed to be the smallest, at an average size of 6 inches, although the Dwarf Lanternfish (Etmopterus perryi), and Spined Pygmy Shark (Squaliolus laticaudus) are both within their larger size range of 7-8 inches. The Pygmy Ribbontail Catshark has a wide distribution throughout the Indian and west Pacific oceans, while the Spined Pygmy Shark is found worldwide. I’m not sure on the Dwarf Lanternfish, except that other Lanternfish seem to be Pacific denizens.
Well, this is very interesting to me as it is off of a Japanese show and I happen to live in Japan and speak Japanese. The narrator in this video does not mention what species they think it is, but rather “It is a pretty darn huge shark, what could it be?” (roughly translated) They also say that it is 10 meters and that the other smaller sharks are 2 meters and they also say “Isn’t it amazing such big sharks are out there?” I hear no claims in this clip that it is anything other than just a really big shark. I didn’t see the whole video, but it seems to me that whoever made the sensational claim about megalodons added that in as a bit of embellishment. Anyone who wants to know the whole transcript translated, I will gladly tell you word for word what they say in this video.
I’ve seen this film crop up so many times being advertized as proof of a surviving megalodon it hurts. Most likely the creation of this new movie will once again spur a movement of people wondering about surviving megalodons. One of the few things I disliked about his megalodon trilogy was the fact that he had megalodon as a benthic animal, while in truth it most likely inhabited the warm pelagic and coastal areas.
Really starting to hate YouTube here.
Can you imagine being in a Shark cage and having that booger loom up out of the depths ? It may be a Sleeper, but it would keep me awake at night.
The other sharks on the video are very small species which are in general in the 1m range or even smaller, they are surely not 2m.
I realize that it’s not the point, but on what planet was Speed 2: Cruise Control considered a ‘success’ … ?!
Speed 2 was a commercial success as it made $164,508,066 (US) worldwide, far above the production budget of $110 million. No matter what anyone thinks of any of the movies noted, all have been successes for Jan de Bont. For Meg to obtain him as the director is seen as a coup within the motion picture industry.
For what it’s worth, MEG has been ‘close’ to being made countless times since the book was first optioned back in 1997. It’s had countless producers associated with it at one time or another. I’d love to see it onscreen, but I’ll believe it when I see it…
Nothing can compare to Jaws.
The last shark movie I remember seeing was Deep Blue Sea (I think thats the name with Sam Jackson and LL Cool J). It wasn’t a great movie, but was fun to watch and served its purpose.
I cant wait for “Megalodons on a Plane” that would be entertinment at its greatest.
Well, Sordes, that’s how big they say the smaller ones are!
I don’t know how big they really are, but they say that those small sharks are 2 meters and that the big one is at least 10 meters long, too big to fit onto the camera, and it is a “mystery animal”. It’s all very sensationalist the way they talk about it.
The other sharks are doubtless spiny dogfish and they rarely exceed lengths of over one metre. In fact the are in general smaller, some species are even smaller than a half metre on average. The chimera in the video is surely also not bigger than one metre.
So if they small ones were about 1m, this sleeper shark war perhaps somewhere between 5 and 7m.
I’m not doubting you, Sordes. I’m just saying what they say in the video! So it seems to me if that is the case, then the producers of this video are either deliberately misleading the viewers, or the TV show that this appeared on is doing it.
I regret to inform everyone that my experiment of having my grandma put a plate of pancakes at the bottom of my swimming pool was unable to produce good footage of the local megalodon being reported in my neighborhood…. Sorry, just trying to get all this garbage out of the way now. You know its only a matter of time. :-p
You know, maybe the reason the movie “Jaws” failed to really scare me was that it involved a shark, who lived in the ocean, while I live in Ohio, and have absolutely no intention of EVER putting my foot in the ocean – so, while I enjoyed the movie, it was largely a case of “So what? It poses no danger to ME.”
A movie, in order to REALLY scare you, has to generate a plausible fear that “This could happen to me, if I’m not careful” and shark movies never did that for me, since I’m not a water person.
I remember watching this on a documemtary on, I think, Discovery Channel a couple of years ago. A gray whale had been found dead and was towed out to a spot in the Pacific where it was filmed and studied over the course of two years or so, and different communities of scavengers moved in to feed on it. As one food source such as blubber or muscle tissue was exploited and then depleted, the group of scavengers that fed on that left, to be followed by another group that fed exclusively on other parts of the whale.
I know they said which shark species it was that fed on the whale. I believe that they were mainly sleeper sharks but I don’t recall offhand which species they were. There were also swarms of hagfish burrowing into the carcass, and then worms that live only in burrows in whalebone finally colonized the skeleton.