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Why do most megalodon fossils consist of teeth rather than bones?

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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).

Most megalodon fossils consist of teeth rather than bones because, like all sharks, the megalodon did not have a skeleton made of true bone. Instead, its skeleton was composed of cartilage, a flexible connective tissue that does not fossilize as readily as bone.12

While cartilage can sometimes become calcified, it rarely survives the fossilization process in the same way that the hard, mineralized structures of teeth do. Consequently, the vast majority of the evidence we have for this apex predator comes from its large, durable fossilized teeth.21