Some creatures are only known from very few specimens, like the pocket sharks, which were discovered once in 1979, from one specimen, then were not seen again until a slightly different species turned up in 2015. To date, these remain the only known pocket shark specimens to have ever been found. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

As a result, the little we know about pocket sharks comes from these two specimens alone. The first was named Mollisquama parini after the Russian ichthyologist Nikolai Vasilevich Parin. It had been collected in the southeast Pacific Ocean back in 1979 , formally described in 1984 , and is now stored at the Zoological Museum in St Petersburg, Russia.

Fast forward to the 2010s, and the sec

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