Walking shark found in Papua New Guinea is new to science

 

Image courtesy of MV Erdmann.

Joel Kontinen

Sharks are living fossils that defy the cause of evolution. Walking sharks are not new in evolution, but this one is new to science. 

“Sharks in the genus Hemiscyllium, commonly known as walking sharks or epaulette sharks, use their pectoral fins like legs to move around and are only known to be in Australia and New Guinea.”

Walking sharks does not mean that they have discovered a breaks  that makes Darwin’s theory that says walking fishes do away  with fishes with legs cannot form.

“The new species the Darwinian has been named Hemiscyllium after Christine Dudgeon at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, who was part of the team that formally identified it.

She first encountered the shark after midnight one day in March 2025, swimming in just a metre of water covering a meadow of seagrass in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea.”

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Never-before-seen shark that 'walks' on land discovered off Papua New Guinea | Live Science 16 June 

Walking shark found in Papua New Guinea is new to science

 

Image courtesy of MV Erdmann

Joel Kontinen

Sharks are living fossils that defy the cause of evolution. Walking sharks are not new in evolution, but this one is new to science.  

Sharks in the genus Hemiscyllium, commonly known as walking sharks or epaulette sharks, use their pectoral fins like legs to move around and are only known to be in Australia and New Guinea.

The new species has been named Hemiscyllium dudgeonae after Christine Dudgeon at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, who was part of the team that formally identified it.

She first encountered the shark after midnight one day in March 2025, swimming in just a metre of water covering a meadow of seagrass in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea.

Dudgeon was looking for a different species, Hemiscyllium michaeli, known to inhabit nearby waters. “Because it was so late and I had been in the water for a while, I was a bit over it,” she says. “Then I just saw one swimming along the bottom.”

She shone her torch in front of the shark, which was nearly three-quarters of a metre long, making it freeze as a defensive response. Then she grabbed it and gently employed a jiujitsu-like move that researchers call the “flip and tuck”. “You sort of just flip them over and tuck the tail under your armpit and it stops them from wriggling away,” she says.

Once the shark was secure, she handed it over to her colleague, Jess Blakeway, who was in a boat drifting nearby.

The species that the team had been expecting to find has a more leopard-like pattern. “This new one has got lots of spots and dashes that reminded me of braille or morse code,” says Blakeway.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Walking shark found in Papua New Guinea is new to science | New Scientist 16 June 

Long-lost sailback shark rediscovered after more than 50 years

 

An adult female sailback houndshark. Image courtesy of  Jack Sagumai et al. (2025)

Joel Kontinen

Some sharks have been hidden for more than 50 years but now it has been found in Papua New Guinea.

The rare sailback houndshark, which has an unusually large dorsal fin, was first described by scientists in 1973. That was the last record of its existence, until now.

Adorned with a curiously large and deep dorsal fin, the sailback houndshark (Gogolia filewoodi) was first described by scientists in 1973, when a pregnant female shark was caught in Papua New Guinea’s Astrolabe Bay, near the Gogol River. This single animal remained the only record of the species for decades.

Jack Sagumai at the World Wildlife Fund-Pacific in Papua New Guinea and his colleagues were gathering fisheries data directly from local communities as part of a project supporting the country’s National Plan of Action on Sharks and Rays. In March 2020, they received quite the surprise: photographs of multiple small sharks caught near the mouth of the Gogol River, all under a meter long and with a pronounced dorsal fin.

Source: 

Jake Buehler 2025 Long-lost sailback shark rediscovered after more than 50 years | New Scientist 26 August

 

Sharks aren’t silent after all

 Image courtesy of Paul Caiger

Joel Kontinen

Can sharks be talkative? They were thought to be quiet, but new research shows they are not.  

”At least one shark species has a bark to go along with its bite. It can make clicking noises, scientists report, a first among an animal group once thought to be totally silent.

During her doctoral research at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Carolin Nieder, now at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, was studying sharks’ hearing. When handling the sharks during experiments, she noticed one species – a houndshark called the rig (Mustelus lenticulatus) – appeared to make metallic clicking sounds.”

Yes. even animals know how to tell stories to their kin.

“I was just kind of ignoring it because sharks are not supposed to make sounds,” says Nieder. “And it just kept happening.”

Source:

Jake Buehler 2025 Sharks aren’t silent after all | New Scientist 25 March

The secret of how Greenland sharks can live cancer-free for 400 years

 

Image courtesy of dotted zebra/Alamy.

 Joel Kontinen

Can sharks live for over 400 years?

According to a study, some sharks do that - they are the Greenland sharks.  They can live for years without tumours. This is a case of intelligent design that keeps them alive.

Death came to the world following Adam and Eves strategy in the Garden of Eden, from which they were exiled and were subject to death, and also animals died.  

A genomic study may have revealed how Greenland sharks live for centuries and yet rarely get cancer.

These sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) are slow-moving dwellers of the deep that can reach more than 6 metres long and weigh over a tonne. We know little about their lives because they roam in dark, cold waters, but it is thought they don’t reach sexual maturity until they are 150 years old and their lifespan has been estimated at about 400 years, making them the longest-living vertebrates that we know of.

Source:

 Chris Simms 2025 The secret of how Greenland sharks can live cancer-free for 400 years | New Scientist 4 March 

 

The cretaceus extinction did not change evolution

 

Image courtesy of Patrik Neckman CC BY-SA 2.0, 

Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists  know that the end-Cretaceous extinction event drove ecological change and species turnover in terrestrial systems,.  But if they believe in evolution, they know less about how this event may have altered marine systems.

“Guinot and Condamine looked at a large database of elasmobranch (sharks, skates, and rays) fossils to test for changes that may have occurred in marine ecosystems at the end of the Cretaceous. They found substantial loss of species, especially those that fed on shelled prey and those on the ocean bottom. Pelagic species and those at higher latitudes had higher survival, showing that differential species survival shaped marine systems across the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary,  ”

This research does not take into account what really happened millions of years ago, only that that sharks, skates and rays were numerous in the bygone days.  

Source:   

Source: Vignieri , Sacha. 2023. A major marine shift.  Science 24 Febraury.  

Mammoth Found In Siberia – And Sharks In Mammoth Cave

Image courtesy of Michil Yakovlev/SVFU/The Siberian Times.




Joel Kontinen

Siberia seems to be a treasure drove for ancient animals. Scientists have found wolves, a burly unicorn and a horse with blood flowing from it and cave lions that were not able to be fossilised despite being 10,000 years old.

The last two links are in Finnish.

Now, Fragments of the skeleton were found by local reindeer herders in the shallows of Pechevalavato Lake on the Yamalo-Nenets region a few days ago. They found part of the animal's skull, the lower jaw, several ribs, and a foot fragment with sinews still intact.

Woolly mammoths are thought to have died out around 10,000 years ago, although scientists think small groups of them may have lived on longer in Alaska and on Russia’s Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast.
Russian television stations on Friday showed scientists looking for fragments of the skeleton in the lakeside silt.

Scientists have retrieved more bones and also located more massive fragments protruding from the silt. They said it would take significant time and special equipment to recover the rest of the skeleton — if it had all survived in position.

Yevgeniya Khozyainova of the Shemanovsky Institute in Salekhard said in televised remarks that finding the complete skeleton of a mammoth is relatively rare. Such finds allow scientists to deepen their understanding of mammoths.

The ABC copy of the story includes a short video of another remarkable find: Sharks in Kentucky Mammoth Cave. The shark remains, found in the walls of the sediments that must have been an ocean in the past. They date from 330 million years ago.

Source:

Well-preserved mammoth skeleton found in Siberian lake.
ABS News . 24 July.

Sharks – A Group of Living Fossils Over 420 Million Years Old

Image courtesy of Terry Goss, CC BY-SA 3.0).



Joel Kontinen


Sharks have been around for at least “420 million years.”

Evolutionists believe that they have survived four of the “big five” mass extinctions. A New Scientist article says that they are “older than humanity, older than Mount Everest, older than dinosaurs, older even than trees.”

Darwinists believe that they possess "some unusual qualities that allow them to be super-adaptable in the face of change, including a fondness for hanging out around underwater volcanoes."

"Sharks, along with rays, skates and chimaeras, make up a group of fish known as chondrichthyes, characterised by a cartilaginous skeleton."

At least some sharks can eat seagrass as they diet. Darwinists believe that they are living fossils that few animals can attain. At least one species knows how to evade sharks.

Source:

Joel, Lucas. 2019. The secrets of how sharks survived so many of Earth's mass extinctions. New Scientist (26 June).

Sharks Eat Seagrass, Remind Us of Pre-Fall World

Image courtesy of D Ross Robertson, Public Domain.


Joel Kontinen

A study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B has saId that the bonnethead shark, long thought to be a strict carnivore. Sharks Eat Seagrass, the publication tells us. . Reminds me of the PRE-fall world

"’ Until now, most people thought that seagrass consumption was incidental when these sharks were hunting for crabs, etc. that live in the seagrass beds,’ study co-author Samantha Leigh, an expert in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, told AFP.”

The team found that the seagrass can form up to 62 percent of the bonnethead diet.

“Over the course of three weeks, the team conducted a series of lab-based trials in which they fed bonnethead sharks a diet of 90 percent seagrass and 10 percent squid.

They then analysed how much of the nutrients the animals digested, and how much they excreted.

Not all carnivores can digest plant material efficiently, but sharks fed the seagrass-heavy diet all gained weight, the team found.”


Sharks are living fossils that haven’t changed in “400 million years.”

Source:

Ward, Hazel, 2018. 'Carnivore' sharks have a stomach for greens: study. Phys.org. (5 September).
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