Goblin Shark

Nearly all material comes from deep water off Shikoku, brought up on longlines
set between two hundred and thirteen hundred metres in Tosa Bay. Animals
arrive at the surface pale pink rather than grey — the skin is thin enough
that the blood beneath it carries the colour — with a soft, slack body, small
fins set well back, an eye the size of a shirt button, and a long flattened
blade of a snout that runs out well past the mouth. Handlers describe the
flesh as giving under the hand like wet cloth.

The snout is not the anomaly. The jaw is. At rest it sits tucked beneath the
snout and the animal looks almost blunt; in use the entire jaw fires forward
clear of the head on folded ligaments and closes on whatever is in front of
it. It has been filmed doing this four times. The recorded
speed of the strike is faster than anything else measured in a shark, and the
mechanism was described from dead specimens for eighty years before anyone
saw it work.

Dormant. In 2003 about a hundred came up together off northeastern Taiwan,
days after an offshore earthquake, and then the record went quiet again. The
species is catalogued, named and understood, and is still encountered perhaps
a few times in a decade.