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It’s not your everyday catch, and it’s now it’s causing headlines around the world.

A rarely sighted frilled shark has been snagged off the coast of Victoria, Australia.

“It does look 80 million years old. It looks prehistoric, it looks like it’s from another time!” Simon Boag of the South East Trawl Fishing Association told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

He indicated it was the first time in living memory a frilled shark had been sighted.

“We couldn’t find a fisherman who had ever seen one before,” he said.

“It has 300 teeth over 25 rows, so once you’re in that mouth, you’re not coming out,” Boag said.

“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.”

The catch was made last month by David Guillot, skipper of the trawler Western Alliance who was fishing near Lakes Entrance in Gippsland.

Guillot was actually fishing for dory and sea perch when he came across the shark.

“I’ve been at sea for 30 years and I’ve never seen a shark look like that,” Guillot told Fairfax Radio on Wednesday.

“The head on it was like something out of a horror movie. It was quite horrific looking … It was quite scary actually.”

He says the creature is about 5 feet long and “like a large eel … the body was quite different to any other shark I’d ever seen.”

Mark Meekan, shark biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, says the species is more likely to be found in cool, temperate waters and seems to avoid warm water.

“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 told the Sydney Morning Herald. “However, there are some maps that show distributions that encompass the Victorian coast.”

The frilled shark gets its named from the six gills on either side that wrap around and almost join underneath.

The Herald notes: “It was first described in 1884 and its closest related species is the cow shark, which dates back about 95 million years.

“It is capable of swallowing prey more than half its size and it eats squid and octopus.

“Its teeth are described as backwards needles and it is capable of extending its jaw so that it can swallow everything whole. Like an eel, it can turn back on itself.”

Article printed from WND: http://www.wnd.com

URL to article: http://www.wnd.com/2015/01/like-a-horror-movie-rare-frilled-shark-caught/

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