Is There a 70-Foot Great White Prowling our Shores?

When a surfer was attacked by a shark off Left Handers Beach, Australia this week, witnesses described the shark as a Great White "the size of a car." Now try to imagine a predator the size of a tractor-trailer!

Left Handers Beach, Australia (PRWEB) July 15, 2004 -- The shark? A very real nightmare of nature known as carcharodon Megalodon. For most of the last 25 million years, these 70-foot, 70,000 pound cousins of the Great White prowled our coastal areas, chomping on whales...and anything else that got in their way. Fossil hunters like South Carolina resident Vito Bertucci still pull hundreds of Megalodon teeth out of the rivers of South Carolina and Georgia, using them to reconstruct jaws that would put a T-Rex to shame.

"Megalodon was the apex predator of all time," says Bertucci, who owns the largest Meg jaw in existence, a ten foot whopper. "To a full-grown Meg, a Great White would just be a snack. What's scary is they may still be around. There've been reported sightings over the years that match a Meg's description, one not far from the waters where that last surfer was attacked. It's possible they went deep, trying to avoid pods of Orca, which may have been their only enemies. If so, then members of the species may still be around."

If not in the ocean, then certainly in book stores. Best-selling author Steve Alten has earned a living penning novels about these monsters, including his just-released thriller, MEG; Primal Waters (Forge). "I've always been fascinated by Great Whites, and Megalodon was the biggest, meanest Great White of all time," says Alten, who lives in Florida, shark attack capital of the world. "In Primal Waters, there are several Megalodons stalking the coastline of California, and the South Pacific. It's a fast-paced read, lots of shark attack scenes, but you may not want to go back into the water."

MEG; Primal Waters is the third in Alten's best-selling Meg series, and critics call it his best. Of course, if live shark attack action is more to your liking, there's always Discovery Channel's Shark Week, airing July 25th, and the premiere of the motion picture, Open Water, set to hit theaters later this month. As to the dramatic rights to his Meg series, Alten says he recently optioned the rights to the producers of Hellboy, along with his screenplay adaption.

To learn more contact Steve Alten at (561) 798-0844 or email him at meg82159@aol.com.

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