Shark discovery ‘didn’t look right;’ it may have been a toy

Goblin sharks are deepsea fish whose frightening, protrusile jaws served as an inspiration for the terrifying creatures in the “Alien” movie franchise. Little is known about these elusive sharks, and sightings of them are extraordinarily rare. They are known to live in deep coastal waters all over the world but have never been found in the Mediterranean Sea.

But recently, scientists reported the discovery of what they said was a goblin shark that had washed ashore on a Greek beach. Their announcement of the find last year in the journal Mediterranean Marine Science has led to a series of events almost as bizarre as the goblin shark itself, involving competing scientific narratives, a retraction and the possibility that maybe all of the fuss was over a children’s plastic toy.

According to the original scientific paper, the Mediterranean goblin shark was discovered by a man named

Giannis Papadakis in August 2020. After finding the specimen, the paper said, Papadakis propped it on some rocks and snapped a photo. The image ended up in the hands of a group of local scientists, and two years later they published it alongside records of other species found in the Mediterranean for the first time.

The paper seemed like a success of citizen science, in which people with no formal scientific training assist professional scientists in research. But it wasn’t long before shark experts around the world started to express their doubts, in a Facebook group, about the authenticity of the goblin shark.

“It didn’t look right,” said David Ebert, author of the book “Sharks of the World.” Ebert said that several things about the shark found in Greece were unusual.

“It’s too small, and its gills don’t look like they’re actually open,” he said. “It doesn’t look natural at all.”

Ebert and others were also skeptical because there had been no direct examination

of the shark. The paper was based solely on a photo and a brief description provided by Papadakis.

In November, a group of shark researchers published a comment paper questioning whether the goblin shark found in Greece was a real animal.

“We have doubts” that the goblin shark in the original

paper “is a natural specimen,” they wrote. They argued the specimen’s lack of teeth, its overly rounded fins and its low number of gill slits were not characteristic of a goblin shark.

Soon after, another image was shared on social media, one that would cause the skepticism to reach a crescendo. It was a plastic goblin shark toy sold by an Italian toy company, DeAgostini, and it had an uncanny resemblance to the goblin shark found in Greece.

DeAgostini, the toymaker, could not be reached for comment.

The toy “shows a great similarity to the specimen in the published image,” said Jürgen Pollerspöck, an independent shark researcher and an author of the paper that presented doubts about the Greek goblin shark’s authenticity.

The authors of the original paper doubled down this month, standing by their claims in a reply to the concerns raised by Pollerspöck and his colleagues. They also amended their size estimate from 30 inches to 7 inches and suggested that the goblin shark in question could be an embryo.

“Embryos of this size are not viable,” Pollerspöck replied.

Then last week, the authors of the original paper retracted it, as well as their reply to the critique, conceding that there was too much uncertainty about the find. Reached by email, one of the paper’s authors declined to answer additional questions.

So ended a nearly yearlong saga that had many shark sleuths squinting at their computer screens.

Pollerspöck said that it was possible for goblin sharks to be lurking in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea but that none had been found.

Whether the shark in this image is found to be a real fish or just a piece of plastic pollution, critics say its publication in a scientific journal draws attention to the imperfections of the scientific peer review process.

“In my opinion, the problem and responsibility lies with the editor of the journal and the reviewers,” Pollerspöck said.

The shark’s unusual appearance wasn’t the only red flag reviewers of the paper should have seen, he said. That the claim in the paper was based on one image provided by a citizen scientist warranted increased scrutiny.

The editor of Mediterranean Marine Science did not reply to a request for comment.

THE NEW YORK TIMES Handout images show a comparison of the goblin shark specimen found by a citizen scientist on the island of Anafi in Greece (top) and a juvenile female found in waters off Japan. Scientists have retracted a paper that showed a rare goblin shark washed up on a Greek beach after other researchers voiced doubts about it.