The goblin shark might be the strangest-looking shark alive, with a soft pinkish-gray body, a comically elongated snout, and jaws that shoot forward out of its mouth to snatch prey. It has also been almost entirely a mystery to science, known mostly from dead specimens dragged up in fishing nets. That changed with two separate deep-sea camera sightings, one from 2019 and one from 2024, that together give researchers their first real look at how this 125-million-year-old species actually lives.
The goblin shark has swum the oceans for 125 million years — and was only just filmed alive for the first time, at nearly 2,000 metres down.
The first encounter came in July 2019, when the remotely operated vehicle Hercules, working with the Ocean Exploration Trust aboard the E/V Nautilus, filmed an 11-foot male goblin shark at an unnamed seamount near Jarvis Island in the central Pacific, at a depth of roughly 1,237 metres. The second came in August 2024, when a baited camera lander deployed during the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Center's Inkfish Open Ocean Expedition aboard the R/V Dagon filmed a second individual in the Tonga Trench at about 1,997 metres, nearly 700 metres deeper than the species had ever been recorded. That depth sets a new record not just for goblin sharks but for the entire order of mackerel sharks they belong to.
Two Sightings, Five Years Apart
The findings, published in the Journal of Fish Biology, were led by Aaron Judah, a doctoral candidate at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's Deep-Sea Fish Ecology Lab, alongside Alan Jamieson of the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Center and a team of co-authors. Both sharks appeared calm and undisturbed by the cameras, going about their business in near-total darkness far below where anyone expected to find them.
"Seeing the most iconic of all the deep-sea sharks alive and looking healthy in its natural habitat is a unique honor," said Judah, who also noted his surprise at just how deep the species turned up. Jamieson put it more bluntly to reporters: for a shark that's been swimming the oceans since the age of dinosaurs, "we actually know virtually nothing about them." These two sightings alone just expanded its known range and depth limits, and researchers suspect there's plenty more to learn about a species that has spent 125 million years quietly avoiding cameras.
Image credit: Goblin shark size comparison against a human diver