Scientists have discovered four new species of walking sharks near the northern coast of Australia.
While great whites haunt the deep, walking sharks are content to scuttle in the shallows. They've been walking, or something close to it, for at least 9 million years. They're evolutionary superstars, too: Walking sharks could be the most recently evolved shark on Earth. That's according to findings published this week in Marine and Freshwater Research. Shark scientists spent years sampling the DNA of the only known walking shark species to estimate when they evolved.
It's a behavior partially driven by changing sea levels and shifting landscapes, which ultimately influenced where most of the nine known species settled -- eastern Indonesia and neighboring islands, New Guinea and parts of Australia. Based on differences in the sharks' DNA, scientists created estimated evolutionary timelines. They found walking sharks started to split off from their evolutionary relatives around 9 million years ago.
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