Angus Dalton, Goblin sharks off Sydney: The young scientist unveiling creatures of the deep, 25 January 2026
The room hosts the fumes of an absinthe bar, and the hallucinations, it seems, are upon us. Dr Yi-Kai Tea, a mustachioed young fish scientist, has just plunged two gloved hands into a vat of filmy ethanol and hauled up the decapitated head of a goblin shark. In its hulk and heft, I feel I’ve come face to muzzle with a slain grizzly bear, except this creature’s maw can detach from its horrid head and strike like the second mouth of a xenomorph from Alien.
From which monster-stalked corner of a pirate’s map did this beast hail? “Just off the coast of Sydney, actually!” Tea says brightly, and lets the black-eyed leviathan slide back below the greeny depths.
We’re in one of the Australian Museum’s underground collection caverns, which together house 1.75 million fish specimens. While Sydney’s proximity to an underwater wilderness was thrown into sharp relief this week by a rare spate of shark attacks, down here the full gamut of otherworldly beasties we live alongside is always on full display.