Meet the scientist who helped reveal Costa Rica’s mysterious ghost shark

Far below the surface of Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, where sunlight disappears and fishing grounds give way to deep water, three unusual fish specimens had been sitting in scientific collections for years. They would eventually become the basis for describing a species unknown to science. At the centre of that work was Naidely Valeria Vidaurre-Quesada, a biology student at the University of Costa Rica who became the lead author of the study. The fish belonged to the chimaera family, a little-known group of cartilaginous animals related to sharks and rays and often called ghost sharks. The species, named Rhinochimaera costaricana, was formally described in Zootaxa on June 10, 2026.Costa Rica’s deep waters held clues to a new ghost shark speciesAccording to the study published in Zootaxa, titled, ‘A new species of Rhinochimaera Garman 1901 (Holocephali: Chimaeriformes: Rhinochimaeridae) from the Eastern Pacific Ocean’ reveals the first of the three specimens was collected in 2000 near Isla del Caño. Two more were recovered much later, in 2023, during fisheries research off Cabo Blanco in Puntarenas. All three were male, measuring between 775 and 830 millimetres long.Their habitat was...