The deep sea is full of surprises, hiding creatures that look like they belong in a sci-fi movie rather than our oceans.

Open wide! The gaping gob of a pelican eel can expand into a voluminous sac for trapping elusive prey in the dark ocean ...

Fish are animals that live in water and breathe through their gills. Gills are like underwater lungs. They have scaly skin that helps them to move through the water and fins that help them swim.

They also helped to ventilate the gills, allowing the animals to breathe more efficiently. Eventually, these paired fins also allowed the vertebrates to take their first steps onto land around 390 ...

The general knowledge about fish is that water is their natural habitat, and they cannot survive without it. However, many unique fish species can survive for certain periods without water.

Can there really be such an animal living today? Of course, it has a backbone and gills and fins, which makes it a kind of fish. It lives in the sea, and because its head looks so much like a horse’s, ...

A fish (with scales and gills) clearly resembling a tetrapod (with a flat head, a neck and prototypes of terrestrial limb bones in its lobelike fins), it ... even propel the animal in shallow ...

Tiny probes also recorded the animals’ muscle temperatures ... next need to affix cameras to the pectoral fins of these hammerheads to observe the gills opening and closing as sharks dive.

The monster 12 metre shark was spotted off the coast of Marbella, in Spain's Costa del Sol, as one spotted said it was the first time they had seen such a sighting in 35 years ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about the world of biology.