Big Meg by Tim Flannery and Emma Flannery

Big Meg: 

The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator that Ever Lived

By Tim Flannery & Emma Flannery

Atlantic Monthly Press 2024

Probably the single fact most people know about the extinct shark Otodus megalodon is its size. In the oceans of the Miocene Epoch, between 23 and 5 million years ago, this thing was the dominant predator, a shark that was sixty feet long, weighed sixty tons, and had a Holland Tunnel-sized mouth crammed with gigantic razor-sharp teeth. For millions of years, it patrolled the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, the waters off what is now California and Australia. 

The Megalodon shark went extinct somewhere around 3 million years ago, although the creature has never been more with us, mainly thanks to Steve Alten’s 1997 novel Meg, in which a population of megalodons survived to the present day in the depths of the Mariana Trench and one of them makes its way to the surface and starts gorging on bobbing humans like a Shriner at an all-you-can-eat buffet. That first novel is the dictionary definition of a guilty pleasure, and it was followed by many sequels and two movies that were box office hits. 

The first of those movies gets a quick critical mention in Big Meg, the new book by great conservationist Tim Flannery and his daughter Emma Flannery, but shamefully, Steve Alten’s book is ignored. Which is also a bit odd, since in his book’s 200 pages, Flannery finds time to mention almost everything else in God’s Creation, from long digressions about the creepy Greenland shark or the six-gilled shark, or the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks, or the infamous shark activities after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, or scientist Louis Agassiz, who first described the Megalodon shark in the 1840s. There are long stretches of the book where poor Meg doesn’t even put in an appearance.

Flannery father and daughter are excellent storytellers, so these digressions aren’t at all painful. But they are frustrating; there’s something vaguely thwarting about a Megalodon book being so skimpy. 

Part of this is predictable; we have far fewer remnants of these creatures than scientists would like – a few vertebrae, maybe a bit of a braincase, and of course all those hand-sized teeth. A great deal what can be written about about megalodons is necessarily hypothetical, extrapolated from the behaviors of the world’s most famous extant shark, Carcharodon carcharias, the mighty great white, the largest of which are roughly the size of a megalodon tail fin. But after chapters about the evolution of modern sharks, the behaviors of modern sharks, the lives of shark specialists, and good old Louis Agassiz, readers might be irritated enough to slap down this book and say, “If there isn’t enough stuff about the Megalodon shark to fill a book, why did you try to write one? Why not just content yourself with an article in Scientific American? 

Naturally, there are some very good moments scattered throughout these woolgathering chapters. Flannery points out, for example, that “despite having become extinct millions of years ago, the megalodon still kills an average of two people a year” – scuba-diving tooth-hunters taking greater and greater chances in search of the coolest of all fossils. And the distant idea that early hominins might have stood on shore and watched that black fifteen-foot dorsal fin slicing the water just past the breakers prompts a wonderful passage about the persistence of such archetypal horrors. “Terror, and anxiety that never fully abates, the ability to survive sleepless night after sleepless night, these are the sieves through which evolution selected ‘the fittest’ of our ancestors over countless millennia,” the Flannerys write. “And the consequences of that sieving – including baseless anxiety – are still with us. Evolution doesn’t care for our comfort. It doesn’t care whether, from cradle to grave, we are plagued by nightmares and nameless terrors, or that our imaginings are filled with the most gruesome of monsters.” 

Very good and very evocative bits like this are the only echoes in these pages of great Tim Flannery books like The Weather Makers, The Eternal Frontier, and the delightful travel memoir Throwim Way Leg. Readers looking for the sheer visceral thrill of the megalodon as a subject will come out of this book still hungry. Fortunately, Steve Alten’s novels are waiting.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News