Nine Sharks. One Week. All the Weird.

Shark Week gets one week. We've been at this all year. Here's everything we've published on sharks, from ancient history to your current swimming conditions.

1. The Ginormous Ancient Shark

Megalodon Was Two School Buses Long

The largest predatory fish in Earth's history was roughly 80 feet long, heavier than a dozen school buses, and apparently fond of basking sharks for lunch. The vertebra that established its maximum size was sitting in Copenhagen the whole time. Scientists spent four decades working from photographs of it.

2. The Longest Lived Shark

A Greenland Shark's Heart Is Scarred, Stiff, and 400 Years Old. It's Still Beating.

Inside a Greenland shark's centuries-old heart, researchers found damage that would kill most vertebrates. The shark doesn't seem to notice. It swims at roughly a foot per second and grows one centimeter per year, and it has been doing this since before the Thirty Years' War.

3. The Introverted Goblin Shark

Goblin Shark Makes Film Debut

Pink-skinned, with a hornlike snout and jaws that literally launch out of its face, the goblin shark is the sole surviving member of a lineage 125 million years old. Scientists just filmed one alive in the wild for the first time. One showed up 2,300 feet deeper than expected.

4. The Ghost Shark

Ghost Shark Sports a Shorter Snout and a Very Long Head Start

Ghost sharks are pale, deep-dwelling, and ancient, part of a lineage that diverged from sharks and rays hundreds of millions of years ago. Three museum specimens, two decades on a shelf, and one biology student who looked closer revealed an entirely new species off the Costa Rican Pacific.

5. The Lazy Walking Shark

Walking Sharks Gain a Cousin: Lazy Shark

There are sharks that walk. They use their pectoral and pelvic fins to amble across reef flats, they are small and nocturnal, and scientists just confirmed a tenth species off Papua New Guinea. The local name for it translates roughly to "lazy shark."

6. The Shark Abusing Manta Rays

Sharks Use Manta Rays as Back Scratchers

Galapagos sharks have an itch problem. They've also figured out a solution: press themselves against a manta ray and drag. Researchers documented it at three sites over fourteen months. The manta rays, for their part, appear to find the whole arrangement deeply unreasonable.

7. The Shark That Looks Like a Traffic Cone

A Nurse Shark Off Costa Rica Showed Up Looking Like a Traffic Cone

Sport fishers near Tortuguero National Park pulled up a nurse shark in August 2024 that was vivid, uniform orange with white, irisless eyes. Researchers confirmed it has a rare combination of two separate skin conditions simultaneously. Either one alone is unusual. Both at once, in the same shark, off the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, is something else entirely. The shark was thriving.

8. The Elusive Mediterranean Shark

Nobody Had Ever Filmed a Mediterranean Great White. Until Now.

Volunteer divers hauling abandoned fishing gear from a Mediterranean shipwreck watched an adult great white materialize out of the blue. The species is so rare in the region that no one had ever filmed one there. The diver scrambled for his camera. The shark passed within nine feet and swam off.

9. The Shark That's Moving Closer to You

When It Rains, It Bites

Heavy rainfall is getting more intense as the climate warms. Sharks are noticing. Researchers have drawn a direct line between extreme weather runoff and rising human-shark encounters near shore. Heavy rainfall flushes nutrients out to sea, drawing baitfish inshore. Sharks follow baitfish. It's not complicated. Except it is.

The ocean has been busy. Happy Shark Week!

Hot Take: If you are in the ocean, there's probably a shark swimming nearby. It's their home. Be polite.