Could a Great White shark the size of 'Jaws' really exist?

Hooper: “That’s a 20 footer.”

Quint: “25. 3 tons of him.”

If movie monsters have taught us anything, it’s that size matters. King Kong, Godzilla and even Pacific Rim’s Kaiju assume bigger is better. Not to be outdone, the shark in Jaws is huge and often categorized as a monster by both fans and critics.

Peter Benchley’s source novel states the great fish to be around 20 feet in length. In Steven Spielberg’s movie, the shark is estimated to be even larger at 25 feet long. But we want to know if those proprtions are correct? We looked into the size of the sharks in each of the Jaws movies in a recent blog 'Which Jaws movie has the biggest shark?' revealing the largest fish in the franchise to be an incredible 35 feet long!

Like King Kong, the shark in Jaws (1975) is a real life species, still existing today (only just). It’s not from outer space or an abandoned science experiment gone wrong (that we know of). It’s just a giant, hungry fish doing what giant hungry fish with daily the calorie requirement of a 5-a-side football team needs to do to survive.

But, given what we now about these multi-finned beauties, Could a Great White shark the size of 'Jaws' really exist? Ross from The Daily Jaws is joined by our resident shark expert Kristian Parton of Shark Bytes to try and answer that very question.

The duo look at the largest Great Whites sharks on record, where a shark of such jaw-mungous proportions would need to live and how much it would need to eat in order to be able to reach such a gigantic size; as well as it’s possible age and cases of mistaken identity leading man to believe the species grew to nearly 40 feet! You can watch the discussion unfold below.