Enter the Dragon
Another entry for World Book’s Monster Week is scary to look at but well adapted to its environment.
September 9, 2015
The goblin shark looks more like a monstrous underwater alien than the sleek, streamlined ocean predator that comes to mind when you think of sharks. This bizarre deep-water shark gets its name from its terrifying appearance. But despite its ugliness, the goblin shark’s unusual body structure is perfectly suited for survival in the dark ocean depths.
The goblin shark has a pinkish-grey body, 12 to 18 feet (3.5 to 5.5 meters) long, with soft skin and flabby muscles. This shark has a long, flattened snout that overhangs its mouth, giving it a blade-like appearance. The fleshy snout is lined with sensitive pores that detect the electrical impulses given off by fish and other prey. (Any animal with muscles and a nervous system makes use of faint electrical impulses that can be sensed by sharks. Sharks use special sense organs to pick up detects these impulses.) The goblin shark’s protrusile jaws (jaws that are able to be thrust outward) are not attached to the skull but instead hang on a hinge underneath the long snout. A double set of jaw ligaments lets a goblin shark swing its jaws out to grab prey and retract (withdraw) them. Three rows of crooked, needlelike teeth line the jaws, helping snag squid, shrimp, and small fish.
The weird appearance of the goblin shark makes it one of nature’s most fascinating, if poorly understood, monsters. Because the sharks are so rarely seen, ocean experts know little about their lifestyle and reproduction. Fewer than 100 goblin sharks have been caught or sighted since they were first discovered in 1898, off the coast of Japan. However, experts do not think that the small number of sightings indicates that these odd sharks are rare. In fact, goblin sharks seem to be quite widespread across the world. Goblin sharks have been caught around Australia, Portugal, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, and off California and the Gulf Coast of the United States. The strange fish are rarely encountered because they lurk in deep waters, usually between about 200 and 900 feet (60 and 200 meters) below the ocean surface.
Being ugly seems to have worked out well for the goblin shark. Scientists have found fossil sharks that closely resemble the goblin shark in rocks that are more than 120 million years old. The bizarre fish is considered a “living fossil” as it is the last living member of a prehistoric group of sharks that stretches back million of years.