Prehistoric sharks posses six or seven gill slits, rather than the five which can be found on all normal sharks. The three known specimens with more than the usual number of gill slits are the sharpnose sevengill shark, the bluntnose sixgill shark and the frilled shark. None of these sharks is often seen by divers. One of the most recent frilled shark encounters resulted in several angry outbursts from marine welfare activists when the people who had seen it hauled it onto their boat and put it in a freshwater tank. The shark tragically died within twenty minutes.
The diet of a frilled shark consists of squid, large fish and smaller sharks. Their large, gawping mouth enables them to swallow prey up to half its length. However, frilled shark feeding has never been witnessed as it takes place in the ocean's unexplored depths. Their diet is only known through the stomach contents of two or three individual specimens.
Frilled sharks grow up to two metres in length, but is not a danger to humans. Frilled sharks are not overly threatened by extinction seeing as their fins are not valued by illegal finners.
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| A frilled shark drifting peacefully along a reef. |
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| This picture depicts the range of the frilled shark. |
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