An egg was the starting point of this mystery. In 1989, Australian scientists discovered an odd sort of “mermaid’s purse”—a leathery egg casing that certain shark species deposit in place of live pups. One almost distinctive aspect of the empty egg casings was a row of noticeable ridges running along the top.
A few hundred kilometers off the northeastern coast of Australia, in the East Timor Sea, near a set of atolls called the Rowley Shoals sit atop a continental shelf. This is where the eggs were discovered. They provided fewer replies than inquiries. What caused them to fall? Its residence was where?
And why were its egg casings so different from one another?
It would take more than 30 years for scientists to finally answer even the most fundamental of these queries, and in the process they would unearth an entirely new species of shark.
Even after more than 20 years into the twenty-first century, people are continuously discovering new kinds of the most formidable hunters in the ocean. As late as the mid-1980s, research had determined that there were about 360 species of sharks. These included giant plankton-feeding whale sharks, the largest fish species in the ocean, and deep marine featherweights like the 20 cm (8 in) dwarf lanternshark.
