Compare shark sizes on our infographic

Since Jaws was released 50 years ago, great white sharks have, arguably, become the most recognized fish in the ocean. But despite their fame, they’re not the biggest shark species.

The largest shark alive today, the plankton-eating whale shark, typically grows to about 14 meters long for females and 9 meters for males, with one specimen reaching nearly 19 meters. Even bigger was the now-extinct megalodon, the largest shark that ever existed. But since no intact skeleton has been found, scientists can’t agree on its exact size. The latest estimate is about 24 meters.

While many huge sharks cruise the seas, the stereotype that they are all large hunters isn’t accurate. There are more than 500 shark species, and they come in all shapes and sizes. In fact, half of them are less than a meter long. The world’s smallest shark, the dwarf lanternshark, is about the size of a human hand.

“Sharks follow what’s known as the ‘two-thirds scaling law’ almost perfectly,” says Joel Gayford a marine biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. As sharks grow bigger, their volume increases more quickly than their surface area, he and his colleagues report June 18 in Royal Society Open Science. That explains why large sharks need different physical adaptations than small sharks do for regulating things such as temperature, breathing and resistance to climate change.

As Jaws celebrates its 50th anniversary, here’s a visualization of some of the most fascinating shark species — from the biggest to the smallest — and their approximate maximum lengths, all shown to scale.