Hey got any fun facts about goblin sharks? I think they are honestly my second favorite animal, they are so cool!
we’re probably all familiar with the goblin shark’s nightmare jaws at this point, their distinctive pouty face can be seen on pretty much every pop culture image of a goblin shark that exists!
the thing is, goblin sharks don’t actually look like that!
see, for a long long time, all we had to go off of for how a goblin shark actually looks were the dead ones we occasionally fished up:
which sure, is how the shark became famous and their jaws became popularized! but the thing about dead specimens is that they can only tell us so much about how an animal actually looked when it was alive, and in this case there was a pretty big omission that we didn’t notice until we started encountering live goblin sharks in the wild:
they really don’t run around with their jaws out! in fact you won’t see the jaws at all unless the shark you’re watching happens to find something interesting to chew on while you’re standing right there.
live goblin sharks use special muscles to hold their jaw in place to keep their face all streamlined, but in a dead shark those muscles relax and the jaw pops out like a really gross jack-in-the-box.
tldr: live goblin sharks are beautiful and they deserve at LEAST as many toys and plushes as the dead-shark variety!
