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

A rare and rather… unique-looking shark has been spotted in the wild for the first time.

Mitsukurina owstoni,otherwise known by the unfortunate name ‘goblin shark’,is a grotesque,deep-sea shark with a long,spearlike snout.

These elusive sharks,which live thousands of feet underwater in total darkness,served as the inspiration for the terrifying aliens in Alien.

But no one has ever seen goblin sharks doing something rather mundane – swimming in their natural habitat. Or even being alive in the water.

That was until two different sets of researchers saw goblin sharks: one along the Tonga Trench and another by Jarvis Island,near Hawaii.

The teams wrote in a paper published last month in the Journal of Fish Biology that this is the shark equivalent of seeing the near-mythical colossal squid.

A goblin shark near Tonga Trench in 2024 (Picture: Minderoo-University of Western Australia Deep-Sea Research Center and Inkfish)

Very little is known about the goblin shark,as we’ve only ever seen living specimens after they’ve been hooked on a fishing line in the Atlantic,western Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Otherwise,all scientists have had to work with are their washed-up remains.

What we do know is that these pink,squishy sharks are typically 12 feet long,and their comically long noses hide razor-sharp teeth.

They can thrust out these slingshot-like jaws at 10 feet per second to capture prey.

Goblin sharks are ‘living fossils’,or the only remaining living representative of their family,a line of sharks some 125million years old.

While this doesn’t sound like the most appealing critter,study co-author Alan Jamieson,director of the University of Western Australia’s Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre,said goblin sharks are ‘charismatic’.

The face of a ‘charismatic’ goblin shark (Picture: Dianne Bray/Museum Victoria)

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Follow us to receive the latest news updates from Metro (Picture: Getty Images)Metro’s on Whatsapp! Join our community for breaking news and juicy stories.‘I never thought we’d see one alive,’ Professor Jamieson said.Jamieson’s team were aboard the R/V Dagon,which spotted a goblin shark moseying around the Tonga Trench in 2024.The 20-second-long sighting was made during 50 days’ worth of continuous filming,so it took a while to discover,Jamieson said.But it would turn out that this observation wasn’t the first time a goblin shark had been seen in the wild.Paper co-author Aaron Judah,from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa,was reviewing archived footage of a 2019 Ocean Exploration Trust expedition when he spotted that all-too infamous snout.Given that no one thought goblin sharks lived in the central Pacific,no one thought to look for them in video.The elusive shark was unknowingly seen years ago near Jarvis Island (Picture: Ocean Exploration Trust/Nautilus Live)It was only when Judah was recently annotating the clips that he positively identified a goblin shark gliding across the seafloor.Judah said: ‘New discoveries like this demonstrate that there is still so much to explore in our deep ocean home.‘Given the newly expanded geographic range of the goblin shark,this species can be included in regional management and a nation’s biodiversity list.’Culum Brown,an expert in fish at Macquarie University,told The Guardian that the goblin shark is easily the ‘ugliest’ shark in the world.‘They are ridiculously horrendous to look at,’ Brown added. ‘Not even their mother would love their faces.’Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at .For more stories like this,check our news page.