Aaron Judah was combing through video archives in early 2025 when he spotted something that stopped him cold: a goblin shark gliding through the darkness off Jarvis Island, filmed alive in its natural habitat for the first time in human history.
For over a century, the only way scientists had ever documented these creatures was on fishing lines—hauled gasping to the surface, where they died within hours, their true nature forever obscured by the violence of capture. The goblin shark, a solitary predator that has existed virtually unchanged for nearly 125 million years, remained one of Earth's greatest mysteries, known only from scattered, traumatic sightings off the coasts of Japan, Australia, and the western United States. Then, in a moment of archival detective work, Judah discovered that colleagues aboard the research vessel Nautilus had unwittingly captured something extraordinary during a 2019 expedition through the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument—a living, healthy goblin shark on an unnamed seamount northwest of Jarvis Island, filmed by a remotely operated camera system called Hercules.
The discovery, published in the Journal of Fish Biology by Judah's team at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, marks a watershed moment in deep-sea science. Just months after the Jarvis Island sighting came to light, another team working aboard the R/V Dagon in 2024 captured a second goblin shark on a baited camera system exploring the slope of the Tonga Trench—some 700 meters deeper than anyone had ever documented the species living. That single depth reading rewrote the record not just for goblin sharks, but for the entire order of Lamniformes, the mackerel sharks, a group that includes white sharks, basking sharks, and mako sharks.
"I was also very surprised about how deep this species was found," Judah said. "The observation from the slope of the Tonga Trench is nearly 700 meters deeper than this species was known to live."
These twin observations shatter decades of assumptions about where goblin sharks exist. Previously confined to narrow coastal regions in the Atlantic, Indian, and western Pacific oceans, the species now appears throughout the central Pacific as well—a geographic expansion that transforms how scientists understand this living fossil. Alan Jamieson, a co-author who led the 2024 expedition through the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Center, called the moment "incredible." "The Goblin Shark is one of these deep-sea charismatic animals that I never thought we'd see alive, and then to do so was amazing," he said.
The implications ripple outward quickly. Knowing where goblin sharks actually live matters for conservation and resource management. Before these sightings, the species simply didn't appear on regional biodiversity lists or in management discussions. Now it can be included in the protection frameworks of the nations whose waters it inhabits. More broadly, Judah's serendipitous discovery—finding footage that had been sitting in a public archive, waiting for the right eyes—illustrates how much of the ocean remains unmapped and unknown. "New discoveries like this demonstrate that there is still so much to explore in our deep-ocean home," Judah said. Two grainy videos from the abyss, captured by chance, remind us that the ocean's secrets are still being uncovered.