For Sale: World's Largest Shark Jaws

Our Amazing Planet - 

A shark the size of a semi truck swims through the ocean. Sensing prey ahead, the monster attacks, opening a mouth bigger than a subway car turned sideways, and lined with teeth the size of a man's hand.

Fiction ? Hardly. Ancient history ? Absolutely.

And next month, anyone with a spare half-million dollars or so can make a play for the most spectacular remains of these prehistoric creatures ever discovered.

The world's largest shark jaw, 9 feet (2.7 meters) tall and 11 feet (3.4 meters) across, goes up for sale on June 21, at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas.

The jaws are constructed with 182 fossilized teeth of the world's largest shark, Carcharocles megalodon, which went extinct about 2 million years ago. They represent the life work of Vito Bertucci, a jeweler-turned-fossil hunter who spent nearly two decades searching for the massive teeth used in the jaw.

Minimum bid is $625,000, but the jaws are expected to fetch up to $700,000, according to David Herskowitz, director of Heritage's natural history department.

The jaw has four shark's teeth that are more than 7 inches (18 centimeters) long — an extreme rarity. "I think there are probably less than 10 known in existence," Herskowitz said.

For millions of years, C. megalodon, one of the largest predators to ever live on Earth, trolled nearly all the planet's oceans. Researchers have found evidence of the giant sharks stretching back 20 million years, but the species vanished from the fossil record about 2 million years ago.

The sharks went extinct at a time when glaciers covered large swaths of the globe, "and some people think that may be related to the extinction of this species, but it hasn't been established," said Catalina Pimiento, a Megalodon researcher with the University of Florida and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Like sharks alive today, the prehistoric Megalodon's skeleton was made of cartilage, not bone, so the creatures left little behind for researchers to study. "The only remains you can find in the fossil record are the teeth, because they're hard enough to preserve through geologic time," Pimiento said.

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