mystery that began with an egg. In 1989, scientists in Australia found a curious kind of "mermaid's purse" – a leathery egg case, which some species of sharks lay instead of giving birth to live young. The empty egg cases had one almost unique feature – a row of prominent ridges along the top.
The eggs had been found off the Rowley Shoals, a group of atolls on the edge of a continental shelf in the East Timor Sea, a few hundred kilometres off the north-eastern coast of Australia. They offered up more questions than they did answers. What had laid them? Where did it live? And why did its egg cases have such a distinctive appearance?
It would be more than 30 years before scientists would finally find out the most basic of these questions – and in doing so discover a completely new shark species.
More than two decades into the 21st Century, humanity is still finding new species of the ocean's most impressive hunters. As recently as the mid-1980s, science had settled on around 360 species of shark, ranging from deep sea featherweights like the 20cm (8in)-long dwarf lanterns hark to the enormous plankton-feeding whale shark, the largest species of fish in the oceans.
This new wave of discovery rivals that of the golden ages of exploration. It is as much a by-product of painstaking work in the archives of museum collections as it is peering into the deep waters of the world's oceans.
Take the shark that laid the mysterious ridged egg cases, for instance.
Will White, the senior curator of Australian National Fish Collection at CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) in Hobart, Australia, was part of the team that connected the dots. After being discovered during a survey at Rowley Shoals, the egg cases had been disseminated to museum archives without anyone looking much further into the cases' strange ridges.
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