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Where did megalodon likely go as it grew older?

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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).

As juvenile megalodons grew older, it is believed that they would make forays into deeper waters to pursue larger animals.1

While young megalodons relied on shallow, warm-water nurseries to access abundant smaller prey and avoid predation from other large sharks, such as hammerhead sharks, their transition to deeper environments allowed them to hunt larger prey, including baleen whales. Once mature, these apex predators likely faced no natural predators themselves.12