A New Walking Shark Just Got Named — and It May Already Be in Trouble

There is a shark off the coast of Papua New Guinea that would rather walk than swim. It pushes itself across the seafloor on four fins, picks its way through tide pools at low tide, and can sit in water so starved of oxygen that almost nothing else survives. In June 2026, scientists gave this animal a formal name for the first time — and in the same breath warned that it may already be slipping toward extinction.

The new species is Hemiscyllium dudgeonae, a walking shark described in a study published on 15 June 2026 in the Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation. It is the kind of discovery that sounds invented: a freckled, spotted fish that strolls the reef like it owns the place, found in one of the last corners of the ocean we are still properly mapping.

The shark that walks instead of swims

Walking sharks belong to the genus Hemiscyllium, often called epaulette sharks for the bold spot many of them wear behind the gills, like a military shoulder badge. Rather than gliding through open water, they shimmy their bodies and use their pectoral and pelvic fins like legs, ambling along sand and coral.

This isn't a party trick. The walking gait lets them reach prey that other predators can't. At low tide they push into shallow pools and across exposed reef, hunting crabs, worms and small fish trapped with nowhere to flee. A shark that can go where bigger hunters can't has a buffet to itself.

The locomotion comes paired with an even stranger superpower. Epaulette sharks can endure hours in water with almost no oxygen — conditions that would suffocate most fish. They do it by slowing the heart, easing back on breathing, and rerouting blood flow away from parts of the brain. A tide pool baking under the sun, oxygen draining by the minute, is a death trap for nearly everything. For these sharks it's a quiet place to wait.

Meet Hemiscyllium dudgeonae

The newcomer is a modest animal by shark standards. Walking sharks generally reach about 70 to 80 centimetres, with the largest on record around 107 cm; this one runs to roughly two and a half feet. What sets it apart is the artwork on its skin — brown freckles scattered among white spots and dashes, plus a dark, eye-like marking behind the head.

Lead researcher Jess Blakeway, of the University of the Sunshine Coast, said the pattern looked to her like braille or morse code, a scatter of dots and lines coded across the shark's body. That patterning is exactly how scientists tell walking shark species apart, since they otherwise look broadly similar.

The shark is named after Dr Christine Dudgeon, also at the University of the Sunshine Coast, whose work has long focused on these animals. Dudgeon noted that new shark species are rare events, and that this is the first one to carry her name — a quiet honour in a field where most species were described long ago.

Local communities already knew the fish well before science gave it a Latin label. In Milne Bay it is called kadedekedewa, a name that translates loosely as something like "lazy shark" — a fitting tag for a creature that strolls when it could swim.

Found in a sliver of ocean off eastern PNG

The species turned up during surveys carried out between 2023 and 2025 in Milne Bay province, off the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea, with the key specimens logged in March 2025. It lives in shallow water laced with seagrass and coral outcrops, exactly the warm, broken-up shoreline these sharks favour.

So far it has been confirmed between the Amphlett Islands and the Trobriand Islands, with researchers predicting its range may extend across the D'Entrecasteaux and Trobriand groups and possibly as far as Muyua Island, around 170 miles to the northeast. That is still a tightly bounded patch of sea — and that small footprint is precisely what worries the scientists.

It is the 10th species recognised in the Papua New Guinean walking shark group, and the first new Hemiscyllium described since 2013. The Australia–New Guinea region is the global heartland of these animals; nowhere else on Earth do walking sharks live in the wild.

Why these are the youngest sharks on the planet

Here is the fact worth saving for a friend: walking sharks are the most recently evolved sharks on Earth, having split off only about 9 million years ago. In a lineage that stretches back hundreds of millions of years, these are the new kids — evolution caught in the act.

Researchers think the genus keeps spinning off new species because of how the sharks live. A group gets cut off in a new patch of reef, becomes genetically isolated, and over time drifts into a distinct species. They are poor long-distance travellers, so populations separated by stretches of deep water rarely mix.

There's a wilder possibility too. Scientists suggest the sharks may have spread not just by walking or swimming, but by hitching a ride on reefs drifting slowly westward across the top of New Guinea over geological time. Either way, the takeaway is the same: this is one of the few corners of the animal kingdom where new species are still actively forming, and Hemiscyllium dudgeonae is the latest chapter.

Named today, threatened already

The celebration comes with a sting. The researchers suspect the new shark may be at risk of extinction even as it is being introduced to the world, and they want more data so the IUCN Red List can formally assess it — potentially as Vulnerable or Endangered.

The pressures are familiar and stacking up:

• Coral bleaching driven by warming seas, which degrades the reefs these sharks depend on
• Coastal development that disturbs and destroys shallow habitat
• Palm-oil plantation expansion, which can foul nearby waters and strip the shoreline
• A naturally tiny range, meaning a single local disaster could wipe out a large share of the population

Walking sharks are already under strain across the region; several Hemiscyllium species are listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List. A small-bodied animal that lives nowhere else, breeds slowly and can't easily move on simply has less room to absorb a bad shock.

Why this discovery matters

It's tempting to file a new fish under nice-to-know trivia. This one is more than that. Walking sharks are a living window into how evolution churns out new species in real time, and each one we lose closes that window a little. A creature that can walk a reef and survive on almost no oxygen is also a study in resilience worth understanding before it's gone.

There's a sharper irony at work too. We are still naming species we may be on the verge of losing — proof of how much remains undocumented in the ocean, and how fast the clock is running. The very surveys that found Hemiscyllium dudgeonae are the ones now flagging it as fragile.

The next steps are clear-eyed: map its true range, count how many there are, and watch how the reefs of Milne Bay hold up under warming seas and a changing coastline. For now, the freckled little shark that walks the seafloor off Papua New Guinea has a name. The harder question is whether it gets to keep its place on the reef long enough for us to really know it.