Frilled Shark

The frilled shark is often called a 'living fossil' even among sharks - a primitive species whose eel-like body and frilly gill slits resemble sharks from 80 million years ago. While most sharks evolved toward the streamlined torpedo shape, frilled sharks retained their serpentine form, six gill slits (most sharks have five), and 300 trident-shaped teeth. They're so rarely seen that each sighting makes scientific news.

The frilled shark survives in the deep ocean's consistent environment, where selective pressure for change is minimal. Like coelacanths, they found refuge in the abyss where surface-world extinctions don't reach. Their primitive design works adequately for ambushing prey in the deep ocean's unchanging darkness. There's no evolutionary pressure to modernize a design that still catches food and produces offspring.

For business, frilled sharks represent legacy systems or products that persist in stable backwater markets. Mainframe computers, manual manufacturing processes, or traditional service models can exhibit frilled shark longevity when they serve markets that don't experience competitive pressure for modernization. These aren't failures to innovate - they're successful matches between ancestral designs and stable niches. The frilled shark strategy works until something changes the deep ocean. The question is whether your backwater market is truly stable or just appears stable before disruption arrives.