An Inside Look at Sharks

In honor of Shark Week, we thought we’d begin with an inside look — literally — at how sharks breathe, move, and operate those fearsome jaws with this 2010 episode of Inside Nature’s Giants that focuses specifically on the great white shark. In this fascinating footage, scientists have the opportunity to dissect a one-ton, 15-foot long female great white shark (they emphasize at the beginning that the shark was not killed for the purposes of the project) in South Africa in order to truly understand the mechanics of this giant animal and how it came to be the ocean’s top predator. The footage is graphic, as is to be expected from a scientific dissection, but the ability to see up close the ways sharks have evolved and adapted over their 300-400 million years on Earth is a rare treat, and worth a little bit of the squirmy stuff. Shark lovers of all kinds will find this video highly educational and entertaining!