Is this scary creature that looks like it came from another planet a rare deep-sea shark?
You better be-reef it.
Newsweek said that an Australian fisherman posted a picture of a creature from 2,133 feet below the surface, which commenters called "the stuff of nightmares." The creature was caught after the fisherman reeled it in.
Sydney fisherman Trapman Bermagui posted a picture of what he thought was a deep-sea roughskin shark on Facebook on Monday. Since then, the picture has gone viral. The strange find made people scared and made some people laugh at the bug-eyed, lazy creature from the abyss.
"The deep sea is like a different planet," wrote one user.
Someone else said, "Only a mother could love that."
But what was the strange catch of the day for Bermagui? The experts just can't wait to find out.
Dean Grubbs, an associate research director at Florida State University's Coastal and Marine Laboratory, says it could be a roughskin dogfish shark, also called Centroscymnus owstoni.
He told Newsweek, "In my deep-sea research, we have caught a lot of them in the Gulf of Mexico and the Bahamas." "They belong to the family of sleeper sharks, or Somniosidae. The Greenland shark is in the same family, but the sleeper shark is a much smaller species."
Grubbs also said that he often sees dogfish between depths of 2,400 and 3,800 feet. Bermagui also said that the sharks are "common in depths greater than 600 meters" where he lives.
"Most of the time, we catch them in the winter," the Aussie fisherman said.
One expert thinks that the creature is a deep-water kitefin shark, which has the scientific name Dalatias licha.
Christopher Lowe, who runs the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach, said, "It looks like a deep-water kitefin shark. These sharks are found in the waters off Australia." "But we find new species of deep-water sharks all the time, and many of them look very much alike."
