If two years ago I reread it during the holidays in Formentera Shark, by Peter Benchley, the novel that gave rise to the Spielberg film, this year I have shot from above and brought Megalodon, a sensational essay on the extinct (or not?) super shark, the largest predator that has ever existed on our planet and that could have swallowed Police Chief Brody, oceanographer Hooper and Captain Quint in one bite with their ship Orca included, and if you push me, even the USS Indianapolis. I had patiently kept the book for a couple of months, as it is a work that cried out to be read on the island, scrutinising with a pleasant shudder (from the beach, with a mojito) any ripple on the surface of the sea, waiting to see the lethal fin emerge, as tall as a person. I can tell you in advance that there is important news on the small Balearic island, as terrible as the attack of a megalodon: everything indicates that, if a solution is not found, it will be the last summer for the Pelayo beach bar restaurant, an emblematic place, the last bastion of a free way of understanding and living Formentera, and whose loss would constitute a lethal attack on life and summer holidays here.
Megalodon (GeoPlaneta, 2024), by the Australian paleontologist, explorer and conservationist Tim Flannery, with the collaboration of his wife, the scientist and writer Emma Flannery, is a very entertaining story of everything we know and still don’t know about that marine creature that has become an icon of contemporary terror based on the wonderful novel Meg, by Steve Alten (Ediciones B, 1997) and the two films, both bad but box office hits, based on it and its first sequel, Me, let fosa. Jason Statham plays the diver Jonas Taylor from the novels with such foolishness that you end up siding with the megalodon. The idea of a shark much, much larger than Spielberg’s great white is suggestively terrifying: estimates of the megalodon’s weight range from 50 to 100 tons (the largest living great white, 2), its size, up to 20 meters (three times that of the greatest great white). Its mouth was three meters high and as many meters wide. The force of its bite was, explains Flannery, the most powerful of any animal that has ever existed, 14 times that of the great white and up to three times that of the great white. Tirannosaurus rex (which weighed just 7 tons). The largest tooth ever found from the mega shark measures 18 centimeters and weighs one and a half kilos. It seems that the creature fed on whales and other sharks: a super predator, and a cannibal. It measured two meters at birth and could live for a hundred years.
The book is full of interesting facts. For example, the megalodon – despite the spectacular opening scene of the second film in which it eats a tyrannosaurus – did not coexist with the dinosaurs: it appeared in the Miocene, 40 million years after the latter became extinct. And in turn it disappeared disturbingly recently, perhaps only 2.5 million years ago. Tim Flannery does not believe, as cryptozoologists and Jordi Serrallonga enjoy thinking, that there could be any megalodon alive in some abyssal chasm, but he speculates that a hominid might have seen it, enriching the nightmares of our species.
Other surprising things are that it seems to have been warm-blooded (the only shark to be so), and that it bred in specific areas (one of them on the coast of Tarragona!). The specialist, who has been a professor of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and director of the South Australian Museum, began to be interested (really passionate about) megalodons when he found a tooth from one at the age of 18, which by the way have a huge market. And it seems that they are addictive, and who wouldn’t be enraptured by “the pointed end of the greatest predator that has ever existed?” Thomas Jefferson owned one and among those who have a large collection is David Attenborough. The teeth are almost the only thing found of these creatures because their skeleton was made of cartilage and it is difficult for it to fossilize. With them and some vertebrae, it is necessary to reconstruct what they looked like, which, Tim Flannery confesses, makes a lot of it assumption. In fact, imagining it as a hypervitaminized white shark on an insane scale is a convention, since in reality they are not related, apart from being sharks and being very scary.
The megalodon might even resemble the “horrible” (not me saying this, I have a fondness for it since I travelled to a corner of Norway to interview an author who had written a book about these rare sharks, but Tim Flannery), Greenland shark, “the zombie of the deep sea”. I cannot resist reminding you that the meat of this shark, rich in trimethylamine oxide and smelling of ammonia, is a popular dish in Iceland, where it is known as shark, but the tasting of which has been compared to chewing a mattress soaked in urine. I have only eaten shark once (we are on par because only on one occasion, in the Venezuelan Keys, has one nearly eaten me): it was in Hong Kong at a dinner with an exquisite choreographer from Taiwan and I mistook a plate of shark fins that they brought to season the soup for escalopes. Everyone looked at me in astonishment as they saw how I tried to chew. They don’t taste like escalopes.
Flannery points out that if the megalodon existed today it would not be long before it became extinct due to the terrible shark fin trade, which causes the cruel deaths of 73 million sharks a year (in contrast sharks only kill half a dozen people a year, much fewer than bees, for example; see the illuminating article on this subject). Emperors of the Deep(by William McKeever, William Collins, 2021). The fins of a single adult megalodon, he estimates, could sell for more than half a million euros, and produce 70,000 bowls of soup (that is, if some idiot didn’t eat them first).
The book devotes a chapter to explaining the evolution of sharks, and although it may seem like a thick subject for the beach bar, it is very entertaining, even more so because Flannery tells of his encounter with a strange elephant chimera (chimeras are related to sharks). He also tells other surprising things about the ancestors of current sharks, such as that one had horns, another, Cretoxyrhina, fed on pterosaurs (in 2018 a pteranodon vertebra was found with a tooth of that species stuck in it), and another had it out for elasmosaurs. And he also tells things about sharks in general, such as that their feces —one had never thought about what shark feces are like— are “sticky and devoid of solid matter.”
Particularly pertinent for holidays in Formentera, and even more so if you have bought the new Premium version of the Easybreath 900 diving masks, is the part of the book in which the scholar talks about Vito Bertucci, “the lord of the megalodons”, who developed a fatal attraction to their teeth. Bertucci, a jeweller from South Carolina and diver, was an expert hunter of fossil shark teeth (he reconstructed a megalodon jaw from 182 that he found), which is an adventure in itself, but in 2004 he drowned in an extreme dive trying to get several. Flannery recalls that the megalodon continues to kill today: two people a year on average die diving trying to extract from under the sea the precious teeth of the great shark, “a pleasure for the eyes and the mind and a delight to the touch, silky smooth enamel in a range of colours (depending on the sediment in which they have been fossilised) from jet black to white through blue, violet and mahogany”.
The book takes the opportunity to review our cultural relationship with sharks and the fears they provoke. It insists that we should not fear them (which is curious in a work about the megalodon), recalls the case of the tiger shark captured and displayed in an aquarium in front of a crowd of people and vomited a tattooed human arm, and maintains that spraying the water with machine gun bullets “is probably the most ineffective method ever tried to protect people from sharks”; hear me, Jason Statham.
What I liked most about Megalodon It is the enthusiastic and melancholic palaeontological vindication of the animal. The book deplores the fact that it is now reduced to a parody of a killer blinded by his voracity and points out that the 2018 film marks the terrible apogee of the great shark as a one-dimensional monster, when it was actually a fascinating creature, “a living, thinking and sensitive being, that reproduced, communicated and swam, as well as killing.” And it says with a strange tenderness: “It almost certainly had its own social structure, its own awareness of its place in the world.” However, it ends on a chilling note of emotion: Tim Flannery does not believe that any megalodon survives (despite the Discovery Channel fake documentary, which mixed the animal with a Nazi submarine!) and believes that only scientific knowledge and fossil discoveries will bring it back to us in all its terrifying splendor, but he remembers that other giant sharks whose existence was not suspected have appeared, such as the megamouth shark (1976), five and a half meters and weighing one ton, which coexisted with the megalodon! Or the small ninja lantern shark (2010) whose scientific name, Etmopterus benchleyiis a tribute to the author of the novel Shark…
Reading the book about the megalodon coincides precisely with the news that last Tuesday, the well-known surfer Kai McKenzie, 23, was attacked by a three-metre white shark on an Australian beach. The athlete and his leg arrived separately at the beach and were taken to the hospital, 200 kilometres away, in different vehicles, Kai with a tourniquet made from a dog leash (sometimes it is better to have a dog than a cat). McKenzie, who has had his severed leg re-implanted, had just recovered from a nasty cervical injury caused by planking.
And now, the news from Formentera. First the good news: the macaw Lola He is in good health and has a beautiful new plumage, and has finally allowed me to photograph him on my shoulder, which has made my dream of being photographed as Long John Silver (with two legs) come true. Martí Mayans, the young man who revolutionised the island’s countryside with his organic farming initiative Agromartí, has opened his restaurant Can Martí in the old Sol y Luna, owned by his family, renovating the place that had its distinctive identity with its oilcloth tablecloths, opening up good views of the sea and with a menu that those who know about these things of gastronomy and can even distinguish shark fins from escalopes, say is magnificent. Finally, after many years of abandonment, Ca Na Cristina, a visual reference house, also in the Els Pinars area, has been renovated and dignified. The aesthetics and atmosphere of the Kiosko 62 beach bar, formerly Sun Splash, formerly La Denise, now called Karai and with allusions to Baja California (hopefully not the sharks), have been maintained, although they are aiming for the island’s outrageous prices: gin and tonic, vodka with lemon (Fanta) and plain nachos, 30 euros. And the bad news: El Pelayo, as I was saying, with its large and endearing Formentera-Colombian family, seems to have its days numbered. They don’t want to renew their contract. So everything points to this being the last summer of a place for which, due to its authenticity, cordiality and friendliness, there is no replacement in a Formentera that seems to be betting largely on exclusivity, long shots and money, forgetting its origins of sun, sand and fraternity with a wild side. Formentera without El Pelayo: that would be, oh, a terrible bite.