Scientists studying seal life, off the coast of Portugal, have caught a prehistoric shark with 300 teeth.
The six-foot-long frilled shark has existed in its current form for 80 million years, making it one of the oldest species alive today.
Its body shape and the number of gills are similar to fossils of sharks which lived 350 million years ago.
The shark gets its name from the six frilly gill-slits which extend across its entire throat. (Most sharks have an individual opening on the sides of their throats.)
Those teeth are useless for chewing, they’re only for grabbing. The shark’s jaws are flexible, so once it grabs a meal, the shark can swallow it whole.
The shark feeds on primarily on cephalopods—squids and octopi—but also eats fish and even other sharks.
The slender, snake-like sharks live at depths of 160–4,200 feet, though one was caught at over 5,000 feet. They rarely come to the surface. Most specimens are pulled up in the nets of commercial fishermen.
Russian fisherman Roman Fedortsov posted this photo of a frilled shark dredged up by his boat on Oct. 31, 2016. The multiple rows of teeth are clearly visible.
The specie’s range is wide, stretching across the Atlantic from Norway to Brazil as well as throughout the Indian and Pacific oceans around Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and as far north as California. But because it lives at such great depths, the species wasn’t even discovered until 1880, by German ichthyologist Ludwig Döderlein, who was exploring around Japan.
The frilled shark is considered to be a “living fossil,” because it has not evolved since the days of the dinosaurs. The same frilled shark shown here could have been seen swimming in the Cretaceous-Period oceans while Tyrannosaurus Rex walked the land.
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