Head to head
Goblin Shark vs Frilled Shark
The goblin shark and the frilled shark are both rarely seen deep-water sharks often described as living fossils, the last members of ancient lineages. They turn up in the same lists of the ocean's strangest fish, but they are not close relatives and they look and hunt in completely different ways.
| Goblin Shark | Frilled Shark | |
|---|---|---|
| Scientific name | Mitsukurina owstoni | Chlamydoselachus anguineus |
| Body shape | Flabby and soft, with a long flat snout | Long and eel-like, with a rounded head |
| Typical depth | About 200 to 1,300 m | About 50 to 1,500 m |
| Gill slits | Five pairs | Six pairs with frilled edges; first pair joined across the throat |
| Jaws and teeth | Slingshot jaws; slender nail-like teeth | Fixed forward-set mouth; around 300 three-pronged teeth |
| Length | Around 3 to 4 m | Around 1.5 to 2 m |
| How it hunts | Slow drift, then a fast protrusible-jaw grab | Thought to lunge and coil like a snake |
| Lineage | Family Mitsukurinidae, traced back over 100 million years | Family Chlamydoselachidae, an early branch of shark evolution |
Goblin Shark vs Frilled Shark: common questions
Are the goblin shark and the frilled shark related?
Only distantly. Both are sharks, and both are the sole living species of an ancient family, which is why both get called living fossils, but those families sit far apart on the shark family tree. The goblin shark is a mackerel shark, in the same broad order as the great white and the mako, and its lineage goes back more than 100 million years. The frilled shark belongs to a much older and more primitive group, the cow and frilled sharks, whose body plan, with six or seven gill slits and a single dorsal fin set far back, resembles that of sharks from hundreds of millions of years ago. So they are both relics, but of different eras and different branches.
How does the goblin shark catch prey with those jaws?
Its upper and lower jaws are only loosely attached to the skull and are connected by long, elastic ligaments. When the shark detects a fish, squid, or crustacean nearby, using the dense field of electrical sensors on its snout, it flings the jaws forward and away from the head at high speed, snapping them shut on the prey and then drawing them back in. High-speed footage of a captured goblin shark showed the jaws could shoot out to nearly the tip of that long snout. This slingshot feeding lets a slow, weak-swimming animal capture agile prey in the dark without a fast chase.
Which one is rarer, and have people seen them alive?
Both are genuinely rare in the record, but that partly reflects how little we sample deep water. The goblin shark is known from a few hundred specimens worldwide, mostly hauled up dead in deep-set nets and longlines, with only a handful ever kept alive briefly. The frilled shark is caught slightly more often as deep-trawl bycatch, and a few individuals have been filmed alive near the surface when they were sick or dying, including a well-known 2007 sighting in Japan. Neither shark is a threat to people, both live below normal diving depth, and a healthy adult of either species has almost never been observed in its natural surroundings.