No, the Shark on the Jaws Poster Isn’t a Great White

A genuine blockbuster upon its release, “Jaws” celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025. While the plot indeed centers on a great white shark menacing the small fictional seaside town of Amity, the creature depicted on the poster belongs to a different species of shark.

The Reconstruction of a Museum Specimen

That pointed snout and the irregular rows of teeth, ready to shred an unsuspecting swimmer, are actually based on a model drawn from a specimen preserved in ethanol since 1939 at the American Museum of Natural History. In the 1970s, the artist Roger Kastel was struck by the morphology of this shortfin mako shark (Isurus oxyrinchus) and decided to draw direct inspiration from it for this iconic illustration.

Less imposing than its cousin the great white (Carcharodon carcharias), this shark has been implicated in at least 10 attacks on humans, of which one proved fatal. Beyond its powerful bite, it is distinguished by its unrivaled speed among sharks: up to 70 kilometers per hour.

Today a landmark of pop culture, the film “Jaws” helped magnify a disastrous phenomenon. In 2021, a study estimated that since the 1970s, pelagic species, including the mako, had suffered staggering losses due to rampant, unregulated fishing.

Asked about it by the BBC in 2022, its director, Steven Spielberg, lamented it. “It’s one of the things that haunts me. That the sharks might hold something against me in one way or another for the fishing frenzy, especially sport fishing, after 1975,” he explained.

A Blessing in Disguise?

At the same time, the feature film also spurred numerous scientific efforts on sharks, without which their troubling trajectory likely could not have been estimated with such precision.

Today, decades of data have proven essential for guiding conservation efforts for emblematic species such as the great white shark, the tiger shark, and the hammerhead, some populations of which are beginning to recover in several regions around the globe.

One can easily imagine what the film’s poster would have looked like if Kastel had depicted the far larger maw of a great white.