Some of world's biggest bats, shark teeth found in Philippines go viral
MANILA, Philippines — National Museum of the Philippines Bohol showed the second fossil tooth from the giant predatory shark known as Megalodon found in the province.
In its Facebook account, the NM Bohol Area Museum posted the giant tooth from the extinct creature found by Christian Gio Bangalo in Barangay Handig, an inland barangay and an elevated part of Maribojoc in Bohol.
“Today, we present to you a fossil tooth from the giant predatory shark Otodus megalodon (previously known as Carcharocles megalodon), though everyone may know it simply as #Megalodon,” the museum captioned the post.
“This specimen was donated to your #NationalMuseumPH last May 28, 2020, and is the second O. megalodon specimen found in the town of Maribojoc,” it added.
The megalodon is considered as the largest shark that ever lived in the world’s oceans. The earliest fossils date to 20 million years ago. All signs of the megalodon's existence, however, ended 2.6 million years ago in the current fossil record.
The museum said that the first Megalodon tooth from Bohol was found by another local, Venjo Busalla, at Maribojoc’s town plaza in 2018. It is currently on display in the National Museum of Natural History in Manila together with other megalodon specimens from Cagayan and Pangasinan.
“So far in the Philippines, only the teeth are found. Like other sharks, most of their skeleton, except for their teeth, is made of not bone but cartilage (like our nose and ears), which doesn’t preserve well in the fossil record. Consequently, their bodies never become fossils, and almost all things we know about the animal (size, diet, etc.) are based from their teeth,” the museum said.
Likewise, a photo of a giant Philippine bat circulated online recently. The giant bat was featured in Gulf News.
Remember when I told y'all about the Philippines having human-sized bats? Yeah, this was what I was talking about pic.twitter.com/nTVIMzidbC
— Alex???? (@AlexJoestar622) June 24, 2020
According to the article, the human-sized bat was first claimed to be the world's biggest bat specie, the giant golden-crowned flying fox. Netizens reacted to the post, saying that they didn’t know the mammal existed before.
“Remember when I told y'all about the Philippines having human-sized bats? Yeah, this was what I was talking about,” the post said.
The post has since gained over 100,000 retweets, over 300,000 likes and thousands of comments.
