Rare and eccentric-looking goblin sharks have been seen alive in their deep ocean habitat for the first time ever.

Prof Alan Jamieson, director of the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre, said goblin sharks were a bit like the colossal squid – creatures with an almost mythological quality. They were almost never seen alive, he said, and previously only when they were accidentally hooked on a fishing line.

“They’ve captured the imagination of so many people, but we’ve never really seen them alive,” he said. “We actually know virtually nothing about them.”

Australian scientists caught the elusive creatures on video during an expedition to the Tonga Trench in 2024, aboard the R/V Dagon. Elsewhere in the Pacific, scientists from the University of Hawaii observed the sharks near Jarvis Island. The two sightings, thousands of kilometres apart, have been published together in the Journal of Fish Biology.

Goblin shark in the Pacific Ocean in the Tonga Trench – cinemagraph

“It’s the most bizarre animal,” Jamieson, a co-author of the paper, said. “They have this incredible mouth that kind of protrudes down from the head, and does a kind of slingshot feeding thing.

“Everyone knows the goblin shark from its strange mouth. But when it’s alive, the mouth is actually completely retracted inside its head, so it’s just got a really pointy head.”

The vision captured – a little over 20 seconds long – was only possible due to the sheer volume of hours of footage collected on the voyage, Jamieson said, with over 50 days of continuous filming.

Previously, the goblin shark was thought to inhabit the western coast of the US, as well as Australia and Japan in the Pacific Ocean, and narrow regions in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The new findings expand its geographic range, with both sightings in the central Pacific.

“It’s a classic case of a deep sea animal that has very low abundance, but an absolutely massive geographical range.”

The individual filmed in the Tonga Trench was nearly 2,000 metres deep, making it the deepest-known recording of a white shark.

Goblin sharks are “arguably the ugliest shark on the planet”, said Prof Culum Brown, an expert in fish at Macquarie University.

“They are ridiculously horrendous to look at,” Brown said. “Not even their mother would love their faces.”

He said “they have these really weird long noses” and “bizarre protrudable jaws, so when they detect prey with their long snout, their jaws can shoot forward and grab on to it”.

“It’s like something out of a horror movie.”

The common name “goblin” is derived from a Japanese name, he said, which is based on a legendary creature with a long nose and red shiny cheeks.

They were an ancient species that have remained relatively unchanged for about 125m years, Brown said.

Goblin sharks have a long flabby body that can reach up to seven metres in length, and small fins.

“Like many deep sea creatures, they probably have a really slow metabolism and probably wander around at a very slow pace.”