A rarely seen frilled shark — a "hideous" part-eel, part-shark hybrid — was captured off the coast of southeastern Australia last month, initially stunning the fisherman who spotted it.
David Guillot, captain of the Western Alliance, told Fairfax Radio he didn't quite know what to make of the
three-foot-long fish that the Australian Broadcast Corporation said was "deeply unpleasant to look at."
"I've been at sea for 30 years and I've never seen a shark look like that,"
Guillot said, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. "The head on it was like something out of a horror movie. It was quite horrific looking . . . It was quite scary actually."
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization later confirmed that the fish was a frilled shark, a species that dates back to prehistoric time.
"It does look 80 million years old," Simon Boag, of the South East Trawl Fishing Association, told ABC News. "It looks prehistoric, it looks like it's from another time. It has 300 teeth over 25 rows, so once you're in that mouth, you're not coming out."
"Good for dentists, but it is a freaky thing. I don't think you would want to show it to little children before they went to bed," he continued.
Frilled sharks can usually be found in cool waters, Mark Meekan, a shark biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, told the Sydney Morning Herald. Meekan said the fish generally avoids warmer temperatures.
"There are usually three main spots it is found, in waters off New Zealand, near Japan and along the coast of the British Isles, down through Spain into northern Africa," Meekan said. "However, there are some maps that show distributions that encompass the Victorian coast."
The scary looks of the frilled shark caught the attention of some on Twitter.