Hello Ronny @rleder,
Thank you for the response.
Well I think Gottfried et al. simply scaled C. megalodon using isolated upper anterior tooth then inferred some allometry in the proportions derived from the great white shark. But I’m not sure if they decisively implied a larger dentition compared to body size. I think my suggestion was hinted by Bretton Kent in his paper about Parotodus; given the decoupled scaling between upper anterior tooth and dentition size between C. carcharias and C. megalodon, estimates based on sole anterior tooth would substantially underestimate the total lenght of the animal.
I think a quite good correlation between dentition size and body length has already been noted in modern lamnids, at least less variable than tooth size>body size.
On theoretical grounds, a whole dentition seems a better base for size extrapolation than a single tooth. So without hard data about C. megalodon proportions, I suggest scaling theC. carcharias dentitions with known TL with the reported dentitions of C. megalodon could induce some interesting results.
I’ve tried this with 6 white sharks dentitions from elasmo.com and Peter Klimley 1996 book and got some interesting estimates for the juvenile and adults C. megalodon associated sets measured in Pimiento 2010, see attached.
Of course the results are only indicative but I do not a relatively small error bar with this method compared to scaling from upper anterior teeth.