Answer To Hammerhead Shark Mystery Turns Out To Be The Bloody Obvious One

Scientists around the world fainted in amazement when colleagues finally revealed the answer to the greatest mystery in the universe.

"Ever since man first lowered his head into the oceans like a rilly long time ago, he has bent his every effort to solving one burning question, i.e. why would hammerhead sharks go round looking like that?" said Dr Michelle Strangelove of the Florida Sea World University.

"For years, religious leaders and mystics said God must have had His reasons, and great thinkers who questioned His infinite wisdom had an unfortunate tendency to, like, go on fire in those days," she told her baffled peers.

It was Galileo who first put forward the dangerous theory that having widely-spaced eyes might be some kind of aid to depth perception, which in turn might come in handy when trying to sneak up quickly on a tasty but agile morsel. As a result, he was confined to his house and cruelly denied a pet goldfish by the church authorities for the rest of his life.

With the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment, Sir Isaac Newton suggested that hammerhead sharks might be particularly adept at catching fallen apples on their tray-like heads and serving them to their pointy-headed friends - until he climbed on the shoulders of giants during a trip to the seaside and realised the scarcity of apple trees in the marine environment.

In Victorian times, the well-known naturist Charles Darwin speculated that the shark's wide, flattened head might be jolly useful for banging Nail-Arsed Dolphins into rocks. However, a century of expeditions by the Royal Navy, the National Geographic Society and Jacques Cousteau failed to produce a single Nail-Arsed Dolphin to back up the theory, which discredited it somewhat in the eyes of the scientific establishment.

"Would you believe, at the exact same time, the development of the rifled-bore cannon was greatly increasing the range of naval gunnery, leading to the invention of the stereoscopic rangefinder," pointed out Dr Strangelove. "With hindsight it seems remarkable that nobody like made the connection. But hey - why should they? Do sharks have guns? I don't think so!"

"Nevertheless, by waving pencils in front of hammerhead sharks, our high-turnover team of grad students discovered that they do in fact have like rilly good eyesight, which they use to surge forward without warning and accurately snatch the pencil from the researcher's fingers, right up to the elbows," she explained. "Now all we need is to devise some kind of corrective glasses with an exceptionally wide bridge - and maybe some way of fitting them to the world's hammerhead shark population - and swimmers and their pencils will never need to fear a dip in the ocean again."

"Now, I'd rilly like to find out the real reason why limpets have shells," she added. "Can I have some more money, please?"