Cartilage Skeletons Allow Megamouth Sharks to Reach Giant Sizes Without Heavy Bone

A five-meter giant carries no true bones inside its body.

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Cartilage is also the same flexible material found in human noses and ears.

Like all sharks, the megamouth shark has a skeleton made of cartilage rather than bone. This lighter structural material reduces body density and supports buoyancy, enabling massive size without the metabolic cost of maintaining heavy bone tissue.

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A creature longer than a bus achieves structural integrity using flexible cartilage instead of rigid bone. That lightweight framework helps offset its enormous liver and wide head while conserving energy in deep water.

This skeletal strategy illustrates how sharks evolved a different architectural blueprint from bony fish, allowing certain lineages to scale up dramatically while remaining efficient in the pressure-heavy twilight zone.

Source

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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