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Animal profile
Pristis pectinata
The smalltooth sawfish is a ray, not a shark, despite its shark-like body. Its saw-like rostrum carries rows of tooth-like denticles and can exceed a quarter of the animal's total length. It reaches around five metres and uses mangrove shorelines as nursery habitat.
The blades along a sawfish rostrum are not teeth from a jaw. They are modified dermal denticles, rooted in the cartilage of the snout, and unlike jaw teeth they are not replaced if one is broken off.
A sawfish looks like a shark with a hedge trimmer on its face, but its gill slits are on the underside of the body and its pectoral fins are fused to the head. Those are ray characters, and sawfishes sit within the rays, not the sharks.