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Who first described megalodon as a species?

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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).

The megalodon was first described in 1835 by the Swiss-born American naturalist and geologist Louis Agassiz.1

In his work, Agassiz originally assigned the species the scientific name Carcharodon megalodon. While this classification remained standard for many years, the taxonomy of the species has been subject to ongoing scientific debate. By the late 1990s, many researchers began reclassifying the shark into the genus Carcharocles, and it is also frequently referred to as Otodus megalodon in contemporary scientific literature.12