If it is starting to feel like we are living through a science fiction movie, then believe me you aren’t the only one. Worldwide pandemics, ufo sightings, and snakes creeping around every corner are becoming the norm. So why not get a little prehistoric and extinct shark the size of a dinosaur floating in our oceans? That’s what was spotted recently off the side of a cruise ship in the Atlantic ocean, a big old shark that had some thinking we were looking at a megalodon.
The video is a quick one, taken from a higher perch on a cruise ship, but it’s obvious that what was in the water caught the attention of everyone on board. What they see is a massive (massive) shark swimming around the side of the boat. It’s tough to tell just how deep in the water it is, but given the distance and the perspective, we have to assume this is about the size of what a prehistoric dinosaur, or later the megalodon, would have been. Check it out on YouTube:
Right? The crowd is clearly in awe, recognizing they are at worst seeing a shark the size of a school bus swimming just a few yards away from the side of the cruise ship. Some more rational commenters simply pointed out that it was a basking shark, a type that can grow up to almost 30 feet long. But we aren’t here for the sane takes people, let’s get weird with this thing. Others thought it could be the first sighting of the megalodon shark which existed a few million years after the dinosaurs had been wiped off the earth. Their time on the planet didn’t overlap, but they might as well have considering the size and ferocity.
It wasn’t just the YouTube comments that had the megalodon shark in play. Twitter folks were in the post-dinosaur speculation game as well. This sighting had folks wondering if there was a chance it was the first sighting of the creature in more than three million years. Because of the ancient timelines, they are often confused as to have been living in the same age as the dinosaurs, but that isn’t the case. Both were around millions of years ago, but with the dinosaur, you need to tack on a few tens of millions to get back into the same eon.
Look, though it feels like we are living in different parts of a science fiction movie plot, I don’t think what we are seeing here is the megalodon reemerging from the murky depths after millions of years to terrorize those innocent seafaring cruise liners.
This isn’t The Meg we’re talking about in which the prehistoric beast was unleashed on the ocean through a crack in the ocean’s crust thanks to a nuclear explosion. That’s as campy science fiction as it gets. This one is just a big ass shark the size of a dinosaur. And for all of the things happening in the world these days, we don’t need some other terror emerging from parts unknown. We’ve got enough to worry about.