A New Walking Shark That Strolls the Seafloor on Its Fins

At low tide on a reef flat in Papua New Guinea, when the water drains to barely a film, a small spotted shark hauls itself forward on four stubby fins, body half out of the sea, hunting in pools where nothing else can follow it. That animal now has a name. In June 2026, scientists formally described Hemiscyllium dudgeonae, the newest member of a tiny, strange family of sharks that walk.

It is the kind of discovery that sounds invented. A shark that strolls. But it is real, peer-reviewed and entirely accurate, and it adds a fresh face to one of the most charming and least intimidating groups of predators in the ocean.

A shark that walks across the reef

Walking sharks belong to the genus Hemiscyllium, a cluster of small, slender, heavily patterned sharks found only around Australia, Indonesia and New Guinea. They are sometimes called epaulette sharks, after the shoulder-like spots many of them carry. None of them grows large or threatening. The new species runs about 70 to 80 centimetres long, roughly two and a half feet, with the largest individuals reaching just over a metre.

What makes them remarkable is how they get around. Instead of cruising the way most sharks do, they use their thick, muscular pectoral and pelvic fins like four little legs, rocking side to side in a gait that looks more like a salamander than a fish. They potter along the seabed between coral heads. And when the tide retreats and the reef is left exposed, they keep going, clambering over rock and through shallow puddles to reach trapped prey.

This is not a party trick. It is a survival strategy. Reef flats at low tide become brutal places, hot and starved of oxygen, which is exactly why almost nothing else hunts there. Walking sharks have the reef to themselves.

How a fish survives out of water

The walking ability comes paired with an even stranger talent. Their close relatives, the most studied being the common epaulette shark, can endure conditions that would kill almost any other fish. Laboratory work has shown epaulette sharks surviving stretches of very low oxygen for hours without lasting harm.

They manage this by dialling themselves down. The shark slows its heart rate and its breathing, and selectively restricts blood flow to parts of the brain, riding out the worst of the low-tide squeeze until the sea returns. Documented individuals have stayed responsive in near-anoxic water for around two hours, and can spend extended periods ambling between tide pools in open air. For an animal we usually picture gliding through deep blue water, that is an astonishing rewrite of what a shark can do.

It is worth sitting with the image. A predator that can switch its own metabolism to near-standby, walk out of the ocean, hunt on a drying reef, and then slip back in when the tide turns.

The youngest sharks on Earth

There is another reason biologists find this group so compelling. Sharks as a lineage are ancient, older than trees. Yet walking sharks are evolutionary newcomers. Research suggests the group split off and diversified only about 9 million years ago, which makes them the youngest known sharks on the planet.

That youth is part of the story of how they spread. Because they stay in shallow water, walk rather than swim long distances, and lay eggs on the seafloor rather than ranging widely, populations get cut off from one another easily. Isolated groups slowly drift apart into distinct species. Scientists think the genus is still actively splitting and evolving, which is why new walking sharks keep turning up in this one corner of the world.

Hemiscyllium dudgeonae is the 10th species in the genus, and the first new one described since 2013. Genetically it sits closest to a previously known walking shark, Hemiscyllium michaeli, but it carries its own distinct markings.

Spots that look like braille

The new shark was first spotted in March 2025 in Milne Bay, in southeastern Papua New Guinea, by Australian shark scientist Christine Dudgeon of the University of the Sunshine Coast. The formal description, led by researcher Jess Blakeway, was published in the Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation on 15 June 2026. Local communities already knew the animal, calling it kadedekedewa.

What sets it apart visually is its pattern: a scatter of brown freckles mixed with white spots and dashes across the body, plus a prominent eye-like spot behind the head. One researcher described the markings as reminding her of braille or morse code, a kind of coded scrawl written across the shark's skin.

For Dudgeon, the honour was personal. As she put it, new shark species do not come along often, and this was certainly the first one named after her. The team studied a dozen individuals from the area, sampling most and keeping a few specimens to anchor the scientific description.

The discovery also carries a quietly humbling lesson. We tend to assume the unknown lives in the crushing dark of the deep sea. This shark was hiding in plain sight, in sunlit shallows people wade through, a reminder that the easy-to-reach edges of the ocean are still full of surprises.

Found and already in danger

The celebration comes with a warning. The researchers believe the new shark may live only across a small patch of sea, around the D'Entrecasteaux and Trobriand islands, with a possible outpost on Muyua Island. A range that narrow leaves little room for error.

The pressures are familiar and mounting:

• Coral bleaching driven by warming, heat-stressed seas, which degrades the reef flats these sharks depend on
• Coastal development that disturbs and destroys shallow habitat
• Palm-oil plantation expansion, which brings runoff and land-use change to the coastline

Several walking shark species in Papua New Guinea are already listed as threatened, and the team expects this one to eventually be assessed as Vulnerable or worse. Their blunt assessment is that the species could face local extinction without urgent conservation action. It is a strange and sobering thing to introduce an animal to the world and warn, in the same breath, that it might not be around for long.

Why a walking shark matters

It would be easy to file this under ocean oddities and move on. That would miss the point. Walking sharks are a live demonstration of evolution improvising in real time, taking the basic shark body plan and bending it toward life in the harshest, shallowest, most extreme edge of the reef.

They hint at how vertebrates may once have crept from water onto land in the deep past, even though these sharks are not our ancestors. They show that an ancient lineage can still invent something genuinely new. And they prove that careful fieldwork in overlooked shallow waters can still hand us a creature nobody had named before.

The next time you picture a shark, you might add this one to the gallery: knee-high, freckled like a coded message, picking its way across a drying reef on four fins as the tide goes out. It walked into the scientific record in 2026. The challenge now is making sure it stays there.