Megalodon

The above pic is a thought-provoking one. The most awesome and terrifying creature our world has ever known...is the small one staring out in dazed awe, hands pressed up against the glass, his gift-store megalodon plush lying to the side. His species holds the potential to annihilate all life on earth, and has already altered the planet drastically--and now holds the second most terrifying creature of earth's history a helpless captive. Poor megalodon doesn't stand a chance. 

This is the paperback edition of Hell's Aquarium, the one where the monster shark is found to have survived along with other monstrous sea creatures. 

 Okay, this is likely enough on the Animal Ghosts book, besides encouraging readers to seek it out. 

But this was the first I'd ever heard of the great megalodon shark. And like many people today, it seems, the book speculates a few might be still roaming the seas even today. 

This was long before the monster became infamous in pop-culture. Not to the extent of tyrannosaurus, but still it's gained a fair reputation lately. There might have been a novel or two published way back in the late 70s/early 80s to feature the beast, and I know there was the Alan Dean Foster short story "He", which didn't get the publicity it deserved.  But it came to the public eye mostly through the 2000s novel Meg by Steve Alten, and its subsequent sequels. It was also the inspiration for the movie. 

I remember the novel had that the megalodon had survived in deep-sea trenches, and had evolved into a species of albinos. In the sequels, gigantic marine saurians of dinosaur age, like liopleurodon, were found to have survived along with the megs. Had had air-breathing reptiles survived in the trenches? They had evolved gills over millions of years. 

In a striking opener, the premier Meg novel, shows a megolodon biting a T-rex (stranded on a sandbar) in half! 

Dramatic, for the most ferocious beast of the ancient seas, besting the most ferocious beast on land, but not possible. Meg did not exist in the dinosaur age, but only million of years later, at the time our own ancestors were evolving. It was no Jurassic (of Cretaceous) shark. 

Anyway, I had barely just discovered the meg in that kid's book, when this came out:

A Tragg issue that came out after the series was officially cancelled, written by creator Donald F. Glut, featured a Charcarodon Megalodon (its full scientific name) as its anatagonist!