If you’ve ever seen a sea-serpent illustration from an old map, you may already know what a frilled shark looks like. It’s about six feet long, with a long slim eel-shaped body, six pairs of frilly red gill slits (where it gets its name), and 300 needle-like teeth in 25 perfect rows.
The frilled shark lives in deep water, usually 500 to 1,500 meters down, where it almost never meets humans. The few times it has surfaced - usually washed up after storms - people have mistaken it for an undiscovered species or a kind of sea snake. The teeth alone are alarming enough to stop a fisherman dead.
It’s also a true living fossil. The frilled shark’s body design has barely changed in roughly 80 million years. While the rest of the shark world evolved into great whites and hammerheads and bull sharks, this one kept the old plan. It’s a window straight back into the age of dinosaurs.
