Wednesday February 25, 2004
Book 4: The Blackness Between — Part V: Backstabbing on the Fast Track
Students of evolutionary biology may cringe at the juxtaposition of a modern sockeye salmon with a prehistoric giant shark, and rightly so. Sockeye salmon were extinct before the project to clone carcharocles from reconstructed and reverse-extrapolated DNA succeeded in creating 30-meter killing machines.

The wisdom of the cloning operation was never called into question, because it created a short-lived yet highly profitable boom in maritime bounty hunting (if you'll forgive the pun.) Genetically-recreated sockeyes were not reintroduced until decades after the carcharocles megalodon had been hunted to a second extinction, so the picture above is completely impossible. If you look around the edges of the salmon, you may be able to see that it was photoshopped into the carcharocles picture.

Transcript

Narrator: Let's talk size. The Tunguska is a roughly triangular ship with sides eight kilometers long, and it is just under a kilometer thick.
Narrator: The Serial Peacemaker is 100 meters long, and though the grunts aboard are pretty thick, 'that don't enter into it.'
Narrator: A useful comparison: if the Serial Peacemaker were a young sockeye salmon, the Tunguska would be a full-grown Carcharocles megalodon.