Freaky-looking frilled shark spotted off Australian coast

Last month, a skipper fishing for sea perch off the coast of Victoria, Australia, encountered a terrifying looking creature: A 300-toothed frilled sea shark.

Measuring about 6 feet in length, the “living fossil” — according to the South East Trawl Fishing Industry Association, the rarely seen sea creature has ancestors dating back 80 million years — has a body resembling an eel’s, and a tail like that of a shark.

“Seldom observed, the frilled shark may capture prey by bending its body and lunging forward like a snake. The long, extremely flexible jaws enable it to swallow prey whole, while its 300 needle-shaped teeth aligned in 25 rows make it difficult for the prey to escape. Some literature suggests its body shape allows it to feed along crevices on cephalopods, bony fishes and other sharks. A large liver packed with low-density oils and hydrocarbons allows it to maintain neutral buoyancy at depth,” the association posted online.

"It’s a freaky thing," Simon Boag, the chief executive officer at South East Trawl Fishing Association, told Australia’s ABC Rural. “I don’t think you would want to show it to little children before they went to bed.”

Skipper David Guillot told Fairfax Radio that, in his 30 years of fishing, he’d never seen anything like it.

"The head on it was like something out of a horror movie. It was quite horrific looking…It was quite scary actually," Guillot said.

The frilled shark, with its rows of teeth, extendable jaw and ability to turn back on itself like an eel, is mostly found in ocean depths below 400 metres. Guillot caught his in waters more than a kilometre deep.

And while some media outlets called the shark “hideous,” at least one expert disagrees:

"I remember seeing one off Victoria a while ago and also when I walked through fish markets in Taiwan," William White, research scientist at the Australian National Fish Collection, CSIRO, told the Sydney Morning Herald.

"I know they occasionally see them at the surface, because a lot make vertical migrations at night time, as they follow prey up and down in the water column," he said.

"It’s certainly unusual and rare. I wouldn’t call it hideous at all."

CNN reported that because the shark didn’t live long after Guillot pulled it out of “the frigid depths,” the skipper offered it to a local museum.

The shark will soon be on display at Griffith’s Sea Shell Museum in Lakes Entrance.

"It’s in our freezer at the moment," said museum owner Coralie Griffiths. “It’ll be two or three weeks before it’s on display.”

Can’t get enough of “weird sea creature” stories? Here’s another bizarre-looking one you don’t want to miss: The siphonophore.