For the first time, scientists have been able to film live goblin sharks in their natural habitat deep in the ocean. The mysterious animals clearly did not steal their name, because they have a very distinctive snout.
“It is probably the ugliest shark in the world,” says Professor Culum Brown of Australia’s Macquarie University. “They are absolutely absurdly horrible to look at. Even their mother wouldn’t like to see their faces,” he jokes.
Brown describes the animals as “something out of a horror movie.” “They have that strange long nose and bizarre extendable jaws. As soon as they detect prey with their snout, those jaws shoot forward to grab the animal.”
“They have an incredible mouth that seems to stick out from under their heads and it acts like a catapult when they hunt,” said Professor Alan Jamieson, director of the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre, also in Australia. “But when the animal is alive, its mouth is actually completely retracted into the head. As a result, it simply has a very pointed snout.” He calls the shark ‘the most bizarre animal’.
Mystery
Until now, goblin or goblin sharks were only known from accidentally caught specimens, leading Jamieson to compare them to the giant squid. “They are animals with an almost mythical status. They appeal enormously to the imagination, but we have actually never seen them alive,” he says. “We actually know almost nothing about it.”
The researchers were only able to capture the brief images thanks to dozens of days of continuous filming in the deep sea. “We filmed continuously for over fifty days,” says Jamieson. This happened in 2024 on board the research vessel R/V Dagon during expeditions in the Tongue Trench and off Jarvis Island in the Pacific Ocean. The images have now been published in the trade magazine Journal of Fish Biology. One of the sharks was filmed at a depth of almost 2,000 meters.
Ancient
Goblin sharks belong to an ancient species. “They have changed little for about 125 million years,” says Brown. The sharks can grow up to seven meters in length and probably move very slowly due to their slow metabolism.