‘Stuff of nightmares’: Mysterious deep-sea shark with bizarre eyes and teeth captured by fisherman leaves Internet stunned
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA: A fisherman recently left social media users baffled by a photo of a deep-sea shark with bizarre teeth and big eyes. Taking to Facebook, the well-known fisherman Trapman Bermagui posted a photo of the shark with the caption, “The face of a deep-sea rough skin shark. All the way from 650m.”
On September 12, Bermagui left netizens stunned with his new discovery of a shark that had a distinctive appearance with rough-looking skin. The viral photo, with more than 1,500 comments and 151 shares, had people calling it, "Stuff of nightmares." One wrote, "That shark gives me the major creeps I can't stand to look at it but every time I look away I see it in my head I can't believe a shark looks like that their evolution is intriguing." Another said, "The deep sea is another planet down there. Wild looking creatures."
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Many began to wonder if it was a real shark, "Man-made...either a sculptor or mixing of DNA with the assistance of the crisper.." One more said, "It doesn’t look real." Others joked, with one saying, "Nice set of dentures." While another wrote, "Looks really happy he's just had his braces off so is accentuating the gums and teeth."
Talking about the shark, Bermagui told Newsweek, "Totally not a cookiecutter. It's a rough skin shark, also known as a species of endeavor dog shark. These sharks are common in depths greater than 600 meters. We catch them in the wintertime usually." Adding to this, Dean Grubbs, associate director of research at the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory, told the outlet, "In my deep-sea research, we have caught quite a few of them in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Bahamas. Ours have come from depths of 740 to 1160 meters (~2,400 to 3,800 feet), so a bit deeper than this report. They are in the family Somniosidae, the Sleeper Sharks, the same family of the Greenland Shark, but obviously a much smaller species."
Christopher Lowe, professor, and director of the California State University Long Beach Shark Lab told, "Looks to me like a deepwater kitefin shark, which are known in the waters off Australia. It looks like Dalatias lata to me; however, we discover new species of deepwater shark all the time and many look very similar to each other."
