Goblin Shark Makes Film Debut

Few animals are as rarely seen or as strangely built as the goblin shark. Pink-skinned, with a hornlike snout and jaws that literally launch out of its face, it's the sole surviving member of a lineage nearly 125 million years old. And until now, no one had ever filmed one alive in its natural habitat.

A team at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa came back from two separate expeditions with video of both. The fish typically stay around 3,000 feet (914 meters) deep, and every prior encounter came from an accidental fishing snag, and the animals die quickly after reaching the surface, meaning everything scientists knew about the living creature came from dead ones.

The two sightings happened on opposite sides of the Pacific: one shark turned up off Jarvis Island, roughly midway between Hawaii and the Cook Islands, while the other appeared on the slope of the Tonga Trench southeast of Fiji. Both sightings, from separate expeditions in 2024 and 2025, extended what's known about the species. The Jarvis Island encounter pushes the animal's documented range into the Central Pacific. The Tonga Trench recording occurred nearly 2,300 feet (701 meters) deeper than expected. That second number is the one that matters. A creature already living at the edge of what most animals can survive, going 2,300 feet deeper than the model predicted, means the model was underselling it.

The newly released footage is part of research published in the Journal of Fish Biology.

After 125 million years of keeping a low profile, the shy goblin shark has been captured on film.

Read the full story at Popular Science, June 10, 2026

Hot Take: Respect to the goblin shark's commitment to being an introvert for 125 million years.