Decide for yourself: Did Discovery Channel fake its image of a surviving megalodon?

The Discovery Channel has given new meaning to the screenwriters' desperate maneuver known as jumping the shark–with an apparently faked photo of an actual extinct shark.

The evidence the image was faked comes from the columnist George Monbiot at theguardian, who might have done something more important with today's column but couldn't have done anything more entertaining. "Did Discovery Channel fake the image in its giant shark documentary?" he asks.

"Come clean or prove me wrong," he writes.

The Discovery documentary includes this image, which Monbiot displays in his column:

That's the megalodon, in the background. Discovery said this image proved that megalodon still exists, which would be a surprise. According to Wikipedia, "megalodon is an extinct species of shark that lived approximately 28 to 1.5 million years ago."

Monbiot isn't convinced that Discovery has found a living example. "There's powerful evidence that this image had been doctored, but again it doesn't quite amount to proof. Until now," Monbiot writes.

He explains why the image looked funny to him at the outset (see his column), before he began digging into this. But then he enlisted the crowd. "To test my suspicions I offered a small reward – a signed copy of my latest book – to the first person who could find an original copy of another image Discovery used, which purported to show a Megalodon swimming past two U-boats off Cape Town."

He had tried to find the image on the web, but without success. Readers who took on his challenge discovered why: The image came from video. The Verge clipped the image from the video:

"It's the same shot. But guess what? No shark," Monbiot writes.

Monbiot tried to get an explanation from the Discovery Channel. "I wrote to the company handling media inquiries, putting it to them that the production company which made the film, Pilgrim Studios, doctored the image and misled the audience. I have not heard back from them."

I'm going to go way out on a dorsal limb here–I cast my lot with Monbiot.

-Paul Raeburn