Britannica Sources used in this answer

What scientific name did Louis Agassiz originally give to megalodon?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

Illustration of a female megalodon shark (Carcharocles megalodon) with a faint human scuba diver silhouette in the background for scale, highlighting the shark's massive size. Measurement bars at the bottom show 3 meters and 9 feet for reference. — megalodon Megalodon (*Carcharocles megalodon*) was a species of shark that lived during the Miocene and Pliocene epochs (23.03 million to 2.58 million years ago).

In 1835, the naturalist Louis Agassiz originally described and named the species Carcharodon megalodon. While some historical records also note the synonym Carcharias megalodon in early catalogs, Carcharodon megalodon is the name Agassiz formally assigned to the species in his work. This classification remained the standard scientific name until the late 1990s, when many researchers began reclassifying the shark into the genus Carcharocles or Otodus.12