The Ripley Aquarium is Broadway at the Beach most visited attraction and your best chance in the Carolinas to rub elbows with strange looking bone crushing jaws. The aquarium features a remarkable underwater tank so you can admire sharks swimming over your head.

Get inside the Megalodon Carcharodon’s life size replica jaws to feel what’s like to be eaten alive by a gigantic shark, the granddaddy of them all.

Here are some jaw dropping facts:
• During its time ~65 million years ago the Megalodon was 8 times larger than the T-Rex
• The Megalodon is a direct ancestor of the Great White Shark, the most revered shark in the world.
• These jaws represented a shark about 50 feet long weighing in at 52 tons!

The sawfish is the largest fish on display at Ripley Aquarium some reaching up to 18 feet long. During the mating season the males use their “noses” like swords to fight for females.

The most exciting show at the Aquarium is the live stingray feeding. Kids and adults line up around the tank for a chance to touch the “ballerinas of the sea”. Here is a strange looking one…don’t be fooled by its appearance is actually a fish not a stingray.

More oddities to admire:
• French Grunt - “tiny but mighty” often you can see two grunts shoving each other with their bright colored mouths to claim the best territory on the block.
• Nurse shark - one of the few shark specimens that gather around in schools and live mostly piled up on top of each other at the bottom of the ocean. No wonder they count among the most shark bites…no ones like to be stepped on its head!
• Poison dart frog - no bigger than 2 inch long this tiny South American amphibian has a “license to kill”. Natives used the frogs poison on their hunting darts to finish off the prey. By the way the poison comes form the food the frogs eat: millipedes, ants and insects.

Here is a virtual tour of the Ripley Aquarium:

The aquarium is open year around. Sunday to Thursday from 9AM to 7PM, Friday and Saturday from 9AM to 9PM. Admission is a little bit pricey at $19 adults, $10 children 6-11 and $4 for children 2-5.

You can get a combo ticket, $49 per person for 5 attractions that includes:
• 1 admission to Ripley’s Aquarium
• 1 admission to IMAX 3D Theatre
• 1 hour of play at MagiQuest
• 18 holes of mini-golf at Dragon’s Lair
• 5 individual ride tickets to Pavilion Nostalgia Park

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