Late Pleistocene

Northwestern Pacific

18,000 Years Ago

The adolescent male circles the pregnant female warily, its senses probing the larger adult.  It can feel the tantalizing heartbeats and muscle movements of the pregnant female's unborn young.  It can taste the alkaline embryonic discharge now seeping from her cloaca.

The female's two-year gestation period is coming to an end.

The male Megalodon is hungry.

A sudden contraction causes the female's thick back muscles to spasm, arching her spine.

The male moves closer.

With a lightning reflex, the female snaps at her assailant, her jaws finding flesh.

The male darts away, a dozen crimson claw-like teeth marks striping its flank.

The female leaves the lagoon, seeking more open waters to birth her young.  Retreating through the widening river way, she races through the atoll, her swiftly stroking tail churning up silt along the bottom.

The wounded male keeps its distance, biding its time.

A second contraction grips the female as she moves beyond the last island into open waters.  Anxious young dance in her belly.  A cloud of blood spurts free from her widening ovum.

Shaking her titanic head, she fights through the contraction and continues onward.

As she clears the outer ring of coral, a powerful muscle spasm sends her caudal fin wriggling in short bursts.  Unable to control her own body, the female swims in ever-tightening circles, her back arching violently, her ovum widening, until—

—the head of a wide-eyed Megalodon pup pokes its way through her trembling orifice.

The nine-and-a-half-foot, thousand-pound male squirms free of its mother's womb, enveloped in blood and embryonic fluid.  Shaking its head, it opens its mouth and inhales the sea, clearing its gills.

The pup swims off to explore its world.

The adolescent male moves in.

There is little the mother can do.  Even as a second pup emerges, the first is speared within the jowls of the aggressive male.  The hunter shakes the newborn until it stops struggling, then swims off with its meal to feed.

The second newborn squirms free, followed by six more pups, all brownish-gray, their bellies stark white.  Of these seven survivors, five are female, averaging more than twelve hundred pounds, the two male runts just under eight hundred.  Leaving their mother's side, they stalk the coral reef of the atoll in twos and threes, more miniature adults than newborns.

Carcharodon Megalodon:  apex predator of all time.  Blessed with primordial instincts 200 million years in the making, cursed by Nature to remain a rogue hunter.

For these seven heirs to the throne, survival now depends upon their ability to endure and ocean realm stricken by diminishing temperatures, stalked by Sperm whales, wolf packs of Orca . . . and their own kind.

Detecting the presence of the adolescent male, the pups remain close to their birth mother, whose instinct to feed makes her a threat in her own right.

Exhausted from labor, the adult female moves off, scanning her surroundings for prey.

The pups trail in her wake, the adolescent male closing from the shadows.