Goblin shark with face ‘not even a mother would love’ seen alive in natural habitat for first time

Elusive creatures have previously only been seen on fishing lines and experts know ‘virtually nothing about them’

Rare and eccentric-looking goblin sharks have been seen alive in their deep ocean habitat for the first time ever.

Prof Alan Jamieson, director of the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre, said goblin sharks were a bit like the colossal squid – creatures with an almost mythological quality. They were almost never seen alive, he said, and previously only when they were accidentally hooked on a fishing line.

“They’ve captured the imagination of so many people, but we’ve never really seen them alive,” he said. “We actually know virtually nothing about them.”

Australian scientists caught the elusive creatures on video during an expedition to the Tonga Trench in 2024, aboard the R/V Dagon. Elsewhere in the Pacific, scientists from the University of Hawaii observed the sharks near Jarvis Island. The two sightings, thousands of kilometres apart, have been published together in the Journal of Fish Biology .

“It’s the most bizarre animal,” Jamieson, a co-author of the paper, said. “They have this incredible mouth that kind of protrudes down from the head, and does a kind of slingshot feeding thing.

“Everyone knows the goblin shark from its strange mouth. But when it’s alive, the mouth is actually completely retracted inside its head, so it’s just got a really pointy head.”

The vision captured – a little over 20 seconds long – was only possible due to the sheer volume of hours of footage collected on the voyage, Jamieson said, with over 50 days of continuous filming.