Real Early 1900s Photo of Crowd Posing with Megalodon?

In 2024, internet users shared an image allegedly showing a crowd posing with a captured megalodon, a type of prehistoric shark believed to have gone extinct around 3.6 million years ago. According to the posts, the image was an authentic black-and-white photo from the early 1900s.

(Facebook)

Posts featuring the image appeared on social media platforms including X (archived), Instagram (archived), and Facebook (archived). One Facebook post (archived) that included the image had received around 12,000 likes and 2,700 comments at the time of this writing. Text included in the post read in part:

The Megalodon is alive!

At the beginning of the 20th century, German fishermen aboard the ship Seesturm made an extraordinary discovery in the North Sea: a live Megalodon shark, a creature believed to have been extinct for millions of years. As the massive shadow loomed over their boat, the fishermen faced a tremendous challenge.

However, the image was a piece of AI art, not an authentic photo of a megalodon.

A Google reverse image search showed that the earliest securely datable online instance of the image was a Jan. 24, 2024, post (archived) by Fantasy Creatures, an Instagram account that posts art explicitly labeled as AI-generated. The account’s bio read: “Imagining new worlds: AI-crafted fantasy creatures unleashed.”

The post itself also included numerous hashtags indicating that the image of fishermen posing with a megalodon was a piece of AI art. These hashtags included #aiartwork, #aiart, and #generativeart, as well as the names of various generative AI programs including Midjourney, DALL-E 3, and Stable Diffusion. It was not immediately clear what program created the image of the megalodon.

We’ve reached out to the owner of the Fantasy Creatures account to ask for confirmation that they personally used AI software to create the image, and will update this story if and when they respond.

The image itself also contained signs of being the product of an AI program.

One obvious sign of AI generation was the distorted features of all the humans in the image, as can be seen in the below collage showing two zoomed-in clusters of people in the crowd. Although AI software is increasingly capable of producing more realistic human faces, mangled features are a well established hallmark of AI-generated images.

(Instagram account Fantasy Creatures)

Another sign that the image did not show an actual event was the physics of the chains shown supporting the megalodon in the photo. With the exception of one chain that appears to enter the animal’s ear canal, the chains in the photo are draped over the megalodon’s snout in a way that would not realistically support the animal. According to an article published by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, megalodons could have weighed up to 120,000 pounds.

In summary, the image purporting to show a circa 1900 photo of a crowd of people posing in front of a suspended megalodon is not a real photo. Instead, it is a piece of AI-generated art. As such, we’ve rated the image as miscaptioned.

We’ve investigated other claims related to megalodons, such as the assertion that a 2021 video showed a megalodon stalking a cruise ship.

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