A 125-Million-Year-Old Shark Was Finally Filmed Alive

Professor Pip's cozy lab glowed with warm amber lamplight. He adjusted his crooked spectacles, patted the bulging pockets of his forest-green lab coat, and pulled out a stack of colored cardstock plates — bright sunlit blue on top, then teal, then deep indigo, and finally inky black at the bottom.

"Ah! Just what I need," he said, laying them down like a very tall cake. "Come see, come see!"

Mia and Leo hurried over, wide-eyed.

"Today," Professor Pip announced, his tail swishing, "we're going to visit a shark that has been hiding for one hundred and twenty-five million years!"

"WHAT?!" cried Leo. "That's older than most of the dinosaurs!"
"Where does it live?" whispered Mia.

Professor Pip tapped the stack of cardstock. "Right down here," he said, pointing to the very darkest, bottom-most plate. "This is the ocean, cut into slices. The top is where sunlight can reach. But way, way, WAY down — nearly a mile deep — everything is black as ink, colder than a freezer, and the water pushes on you with the weight of a whole car! That is called the deep sea."

He held up a tiny paper cutout — a shark with a long, pointy snout and jaws on a springy little tab.

"Meet the goblin shark. And just this week, scientists near Hawaii and near the Tonga Trench filmed a living one in the wild for the very first time!"

"You mean nobody had ever seen one alive before?" Leo asked.

"Only ones caught by fishing lines by accident and pulled up," Professor Pip said, gently pushing the paper shark's jaw. It sprang forward with a soft snap! "This is how they catch dinner — their jaws pop out like a tiny drawer!"

"Whoa!" laughed Mia. "Like the frog on my slap bracelet!"

"Precisely!" Professor Pip beamed. "And here is the wonder of it, my dear scientists: the goblin shark is called a living fossil. That means it looks almost exactly the same as its great-great-great-great-great-great-grandshark did over a hundred million years ago. It hardly changed at all."

He looked over at the glow of his fish tank. "Somewhere down there, in the dark, one of these old, old creatures is drifting past a lantern-shaped fish, not knowing that up here, we finally saw it swim."

Professor Pip handed each child a tiny flashlight and a piece of blue tissue paper. "Now you try. Shine your light through the paper — pretend you're a deep-sea scientist searching for a goblin shark. What do you find in the shadows?"