The living fossil

This is the frilled shark. When open, the frilled shark’s mouth reveals 300 trident-shaped teeth aligned in 25 rows. Aside from its unmistakable toothiness, the mouth looks larger than that of other sharks because its jaws terminate at the back of the fish’s head instead of underneath the skull. The head appears to be all mouth, capped off at the throat region with six frilled gills, hence its name. 

The first gill slit cuts right across the throat, making it look as if someone sliced it with a knife there. The rest of the brown body is nearly identical to that of an eel, save for the elasmobranch’s small pectoral fins, dorsal fin, anal fin and lengthy caudal fin. Because of the fin placement and shape, R. Aidan Martin of theReefQuest Center for Shark Research once described the shark’s posterior as looking like “the wings on a throwing dart.”

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