🤯 Did You Know (click to read)
Its primitive features include six gill slits instead of the typical five found in most sharks.
Fossil evidence places frilled shark ancestors at least 80 million years in the past, meaning their lineage coexisted with late Cretaceous dinosaurs. Their morphology has changed remarkably little, earning them the description of a living fossil.
💥 Impact (click to read)
To imagine a predator swimming today with anatomical traits from the age of Tyrannosaurus rex forces a confrontation with evolutionary time. Entire mammalian orders have risen and vanished while this body plan persisted in deep water.
Such evolutionary stability suggests that the deep sea can act as a refuge from surface-level extinction pressures. In a sense, the frilled shark represents a biological time capsule still actively hunting in modern oceans.
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