On the 21 of January 2007, a 5 ft 3in Shark was caught in Japanese waters. This may seem quite uninteresting, but the shark that was spotted is one of the very few unique species of shark that have survived without evolving at all. Called the frilled shark (because of how it flares its gills), this shark has not changed for a HUNDRED MILLION years. Scientists do not know why it hasn’t evolved, and for a while it was even thought to be extinct. When it was discovered to be extant (i.e. still existing) many people called it the “living fossil”. This is because it is the only species in the shark family that completely avoided evolution! We don’t see frilled sharks as regularly as those sharks from the Jaws movie, because the frilled shark can live as far as 5,150 ft below sea level. Although they are rarely seen, they have been spotted in certain areas around the world… from northern Norway to France, Morocco, West Africa (where they have the 2nd kind of frilled shark, called the Southern African frilled shark, which only lives in the regions of South-Africa), New Zealand, Hawaii, Chile and other places… The video […]