For years after the movie version of Jaws exploded into the public consciousness, I was asked why I thought it had had such an impact. I had no answer beyond the obvious: People have always been terrified of sharks, of deep water, and of the unknown, and this story touched all those nerves.

Then, a few years ago, I came across some words by Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson. “We’re not just afraid of predators,” he wrote, “we’re transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal sense, we love our monsters.”

True enough. I, transfixed, had woven stories and fables. And here were these men, women, and children—soaking, cold, and tired—gathered in what was definitely a kind of love for this monster.

They all wanted to know what had killed her. What could kill her? Children especially wanted to know why, why would anyone kill such an animal?

The answer to what had killed the shark was depressingly banal. “A longline,” said John Keesing, then SARDI’s chief scientist. “A fisherman had set out a longline to catch snapper, and she happened upon it. She got hooked, and in trying to get away, she wrapped herself up in the rope. When it came taut, she couldn’t move. She drowned.” Like many sharks, she had to keep moving to flush oxygen-rich water over her gills.

Longlines are among the most insidious killers in the sea, for they kill indiscriminately, old or young, pregnant or not, endangered or not. In the open ocean some longlines stretch for 80 miles and contain thousands of hooks.

Unlike some fishermen, the man who caught this shark obeyed the law, notified the proper authorities, and even brought the body to shore. He had requested that he be given the jaw. The government turned him down.

“We couldn’t give it to him,” John explained. “A jaw this size might bring $10,000 on the open market. If we let him keep it, suddenly we’d find a whole lot of white sharks being killed ‘by accident.’ ”

And so, jaw and all, the shark was hauled off to the Bolivar maceration facility, next door to a sewage-treatment plant on the plains north of Adelaide, where a ton and a half of great white shark could be studied out of the public eye.

This was a rare boon for the scientists. One reason so little is known about great whites is that they are enormous, bulky, and hard to handle. And that’s when they’re dead. Studying a live great white shark up close and in detail is, for obvious reasons, practically impossible.

Barry Bruce, one of Australia’s preeminent shark experts, had flown over from his base in Tasmania to oversee the dissection and study of the shark. He and his assistants got into blue jumpsuits, rubber boots, and gloves, and as Barry delicately—with a knife suitable for quartering an ox—sliced open the belly of the beast, I stood beside him and watched.