It’s Known that all the terrifying animals live in or off the coast of Australia. And it seems like every week, a new terrifying rare shark is pulled out of the ocean by some hapless fisherman.
So what’s one more?
This week’s edition of oceanic terror comes in the form of the rare goblin shark, which was caught off of Australia’s southeast coast in January and was recently delivered to the Australian Museum in Sydney.
According to Yahoo! News, the shark has been…
described by museum staff as a “alien of the deep” probably because it doesn’t quite look like anything else found on this planet, due mainly to the comically long snout and prickly teeth.
Okay, the real reason the shark earned that nickname is because way down on the ocean floor, which can be at a depth of anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 feet. The shark is such a rare catch because it is always so far away from the water’s surface.
This particular shark measures in at four feet in length, but NBC News reported that the museum has two other specimens that come in at 12 feet and one that is smaller than the new shark.
This male is only the fourth specimen the museum has been able to acquire since first receiving one in he ’80s.
“It’s pretty impressive, it’s not hideous it’s beautiful,” the Australian Museum’s fish collection manager Mark McGrouther told AFP, via Yahoo! News.
Yeah, go sell that crazy somewhere else, McGrouther. We’ve seen the pictures.
McGrouther went on to explain how the shark uses its snout to detect the presence of prey.
“I suspect because it has got soft, flabby musculature, it doesn’t need much energy… so it will swim slowly over the bottom just using its snout like a metal detector,” said McGrouther.
“It will be sweeping over the bottom and when it detects a small fish, or a crab or a squid it will shoot those jaws out ‘wham’ and capture whatever it is.
It will spear it with those sharp pointed teeth and then just wolf it down whole.”
Nothing terrifying about that description.
If you’d like to learn more about this shark, watch this video provided by the Australian Museum. If you’d like to have another night of restful sleep at some point in your life, don’t watch it. They’re your nightmares, after all.
