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🤯 Did You Know (click to read)
The frilled appearance comes from the overlapping edges of its gill filaments.
Most modern sharks possess five gill slits, but the frilled shark has six pairs, a primitive trait linking it to ancient shark lineages. The first gill slit even extends across the throat, forming the distinctive frilled collar.
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💥 Impact (click to read)
That additional gill slit is more than cosmetic; it represents a retained ancestral condition rarely preserved in modern species. It visually separates the frilled shark from the streamlined forms dominating today’s oceans.
The persistence of this anatomical throwback highlights how evolutionary experimentation from the distant past still swims in present-day seas, largely hidden from human view.
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