Goblin sharks have spent years in public imagination as something half-seen, half-legendary, a pale, long-snouted predator usually known from carcasses, fishing lines, and brief encounters near death. Now they have finally been seen alive where they actually live, deep in the ocean. As a result, that changes more than a shark checklist. A University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa-led team has reported the first published live observations of goblin sharks, Mitsukurina owstoni, in their natural deep-sea habitat. The paper, published in the Journal of Fish Biology, describes two separate sightings. One was near Jarvis Island in 2019, and another was on the slope of the Tonga Trench in 2024. For a species often called a “living fossil,” the footage fills in a major blank. Goblin sharks are the only living members of their family, a shark lineage dating back nearly 125 million years. Lead author Aaron Judah, a doctoral candidate in the Deep-Sea Fish Ecology Lab and the Deep-Sea Animal Research Center in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, said the …