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  • 2013-08-04 (xsd:date)
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  • Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives? (en)
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  • In August 2013, Discovery Channel kicked off its popular annual Shark Week programming with an episode entitled Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives (and followed it up in August 2014 with Megalodon: The New Evidence). That installment featured the efforts of a group of researchers to document the possibility that the prehistoric megalodon species of shark (the largest predatory marine creature in Earth's history, measuring from about 46–59 ft. in length) has not been extinct for more than a million years, as current scientific belief holds: The episode featured vivid segments such researchers recounting their attempts to tag a megalodon from a submerged shark cage, and supposed video footage of a South African charter vessel that capsized after something (presumably a shark of monstrous size) rammed and/or bit it. Of course, the faux researchers in this episode (marine biologist Colin Drake isn't a real person but rather a fictional role played by actor Darron Meyer) never did find hard evidence of a living megalodon; they merely claimed to have tagged something that escaped by supposedly diving deeper than any known shark, but they didn't get a good look at it. And if something chomped and capsized a vessel off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, on 5 April 2013, killing several people, the South African press apparently didn't find that event noteworthy enough to report on at all. The megalodon species of shark did exist, and it's not absolutely impossible that an undocumented species of huge shark lives in the oceans' depths (after all, it was only fairly recently that scientists documented the existence of the giant squid). But no such discovery or substantive evidence about living megalodons was at hand in the 2013 Shark Week premiere, and as Christie Wilcox wrote in a Discover blog entry, the possibility that some megalodons might still be around isn't even a subject of genuine inquiry or controversy among legitimate scientists: Just as in the case of the faked Mermaids: The Body Found documentary (which aired on Animal Planet, part of the Discovery Channel family), Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives included a briefly-displayed disclaimer declaring the program's use of dramatized events and characters to make up for a lack of hard science and credible evidence: Submarine, the legendary (but non-existent) 35-foot monster shark reappeared in the Discovery Channel's Shark Week feature Shark of Darkness: Wrath of Submarine in 2014, with yet more claims of its deliberately attacking a ship off the coast of South Africa. That episode also featured a disclaimer noting that the Submarine material is largely fictionalized drama based on hearsay and rumor, and there's no actual physical evidence documenting that such a creature exists and has attacked ships: As Bob Strauss commented in his article Megalodon — The Monster Shark Lives! (Not): Or, as Christie Wilcox concluded: (en)
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