A 125-million-year-old ‘living fossil’ shark was just caught on camera alive for the first time ever

Some animals are so rarely seen alive that scientists have had to piece together their existence almost entirely from dead specimens. The goblin shark was one of them, until a new study captured the first-ever footage of the species swimming freely and healthy in its natural deep-sea habitat.

Published in the Journal of Fish Biology by researchers from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, the study documents two separate sightings of goblin sharks (Mitsukurina owstoni): one near a seamount close to Jarvis Island in the Central Pacific, and another along the slope of the Tonga Trench. Every previous encounter with a live goblin shark had come only after the animal was accidentally caught in fishing gear and pulled to the surface, where it typically died shortly afterward.

Nicknamed ‘living fossils,’ goblin sharks are the sole surviving members of a shark family that dates back roughly 125 million years, instantly recognisable by their long, flattened snout and protruding jaws.

Lead author Aaron Judah, a doctoral candidate at UH Mānoa’s Deep-Sea Animal Research Center, said seeing the species alive and healthy in the wild was “a unique honor.” He noted that the Tonga Trench shark was found nearly 700 metres deeper than the species had ever been recorded, a new depth record not only for goblin sharks but for the entire order of Lamniformes, which also includes the great white, basking and mako sharks.

The two sightings, recorded hundreds of kilometres apart, suggest goblin sharks range across a much larger stretch of the Pacific Ocean than researchers previously believed, adding a significant new chapter to what little is known about one of the sea’s strangest predators.