With rows of needle-sharp teeth and a strange body shape, the frilled shark is built to give you nightmares and could be described as a living fossil. A group of fishermen got a rare glimpse of this prehistoric-looking creature when a fishing trawler’s net snagged a frilled shark recently.
“It was like a large eel, probably 1.5 meters [about 5 feet] long, and the body was quite different to any other shark I’d ever seen,” fisherman David Guillot said. “The head on it was like something out of a horror movie. It was quite horrific looking.”
There isn’t much known about the frilled shark that gets its name from the six pairs of gills it has. They are believed to live at depths of between several hundred and several thousand feet and are rarely been seen in their natural environment. A living specimen was oncecaught in Japan in 2007, but that fish died shortly after it was put in a large seawater tank.
[viaNPR]
