Mysterious Sea Shark With Bulging Eyes And Bizarre Teeth Baffles Fisherman [Photo]
A fisherman in Australia was left baffled after he caught a mysterious deep sea shark with bulging eyes and protruding teeth. The Sydney-based man has posted a picture of the bizarre creature and it has since gone viral.
The unusual discovery was made by Trapman Bermagui, who claimed to have caught the sea shark from a depth of 650 meters underwater.
"The face of a deep sea rough skin shark. All the way from 650m," Bermagui captioned his post, which has fetched more than 1.5k likes since it was shared on his Facebook page Monday.
Many online users said the sea creature looks prehistoric.
"The deep sea is another planet down there. wild looking creatures," one person commented.
Although it is not known the sea creature belonged to which species category, the photo has sparked curiosity among the viewers. Some users said they believe it is a cookie cutter shark, a species of shark known to cause cookie-shaped wounds on the bodies of larger animals using their razor-sharp lower teeth.
However, Bermagui refuted the claims by posting a picture of a cookie-cutter shark. "This is the mouth of a cookie-cutter shark. The one in the picture was different than this. Also, it was about 15kg and 5 feet long," he said.
Some experts think it is a rough skin dogfish shark known as "Centroscymnus owstonii." "In my deep-sea research, we have caught quite a few of them in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Bahamas. They are in the family Somniosidae, the sleeper sharks, the same family of the Greenland shark, but obviously a much smaller species," said Dean Grubbs, an associate research director at Florida State University's Coastal and Marine Laboratory said, NY Post reported.
However, Grubbs added that dogfish sharks were more common at debts around 2,400- 3,800 feet, much deeper than from where Bermagui reportedly caught it.
Another marine expert, Christopher Lowe, director of California State University at Long Beach's Shark Lab, said it could be a deep-water kitefin shark.
"Looks to me like a deep-water kitefin shark, which are known in the waters off Australia.However, we discover new species of deep-water shark all the time, and many look very similar to each other," Lowe said.
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