Which shark can 'walk' on its fins along the seafloor?

The epaulette shark can “walk” on its fins along the seafloor. Rather than relying only on swimming, it bends its body from side to side and pushes against the bottom with its muscular pectoral and pelvic fins.

This unusual gait helps the shark navigate shallow coral reefs, sandy flats, rocky crevices, and tidal pools around northern Australia and New Guinea. Its paired fins have flexible, partly separated skeletal supports that allow them to rotate and work somewhat like limbs. The movement is often compared with the salamander-like walking of early land vertebrates.

Epaulette sharks are small, usually less than 1 metre long, and mainly active at night. They can tolerate severe oxygen shortages in isolated tidal pools and may even crawl briefly across exposed ground to reach another pool. A common mix-up is treating “walking shark” as one exact species name: several members of the Hemiscyllium genus walk, but the epaulette shark is the classic quiz answer.