March 4, 2015
Two places that are bountiful sources of wonderfully terrifying creatures: Australia and the ocean. Combine the two, and there is seemingly no end to the array of eye-opening specimens.
This time: It’s the goblin shark.
The Australian Museum recently received a specimen of one of these, only the fourth ever to be acquired by the Sydney museum, with the first two collected in the 1980s. Described as an “alien of the deep”, goblins live way down–about 2900 feet (900 meters)–and are rarely caught by humans.
The sharks’ most notable feature, alongside a set of “nail-like” teeth that rival any dental terror in the shark world, is a long, protruding snout. Rather than looking like goblins, the 125 million-year-old “living fossils” actually look like ocean-dwelling versions of proboscis monkeys, platypuses, or unicorns if nature had got drunk and decided it’d had just about enough of cutesiness.
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