Ultra-Rare Goblin Shark Discovery Is Really a Toy, Argue Scientists

A controversy is raging within the small but fiercely passionate world of ichthyology (the study of fishes). Depending on who you talk to, either a rare deep-sea shark washed up on the shores of Greece’s Anafi Island in 2020, and marked the first-ever recording of a goblin shark sighting in the Mediterranean Sea; or, some scientists faked the whole discovery using a plastic toy and duped the whole world with some trickery that’s not much more advanced than a simple social media prank.

The fight stems from a paper published in the journal Mediterranean Marine Science last May, which…