Metro newspaper on March 3 reported that a group of fishermen in Australia had just caught a strange shark that looked like an alien character from director John Hurt’s “Alien”.
Fortunately, this strange creature with jagged teeth does not contain acidic blood or spit out weird substances like the character in the movie.
Experts have identified the creature as a goblin shark, one of the rarest sharks in the world, known as a “living fossil”. Their favorite food is octopus. The animal has now been brought to the Australian museum. Mark McGrouther, curator of the museum’s fish collection, said it was the most interesting creature he had ever seen with “unbelievable teeth”.
The teeth of the fat goblins are extremely strange. Photo: SWNS
The prehistoric-looking goblin sharks live on deep sea bottoms and little is known about their lives.
“It’s pretty impressive, it’s not hideous it’s beautiful,” said the Αustralian Museum’s fish collection manager Mark McGrouther, who described its teeth as looking like “little daggers”.
Prehistoric-looking goblin sharks live in the deep sea and little is known about their lives
“They are not caught terribly often. They are not encountered terribly often at all.”
It showed off its fleshy snout, nail-like teeth, and soft pink body
McGrouther said this was only the fourth goblin shark to be acquired by the museum in Sydney, with the first two collected in the 1980s.
The latest was picked up by a fisherman in January. It was found near Eden, off Αustralia’s southeast coast, at a depth of about 200 metres (656 feet) and delivered to a local aquarium which kept it in excellent condition for the museum.
They like to eat octopus in a swallow style. Photo: SWNS
McGrouther said he was “thrilled” to handle the shark, which is found in the Pacific, Αtlantic and Indian oceans. The species, whose scientific name is “Mitsukurina owstoni”, is thought to be a living fossil dating back some 125 million years.
