IT HAS up to 47 rows of teeth, grows to lengths of two metres and is mostly found in ocean depths below 400 metres — or in a Taiwanese fish market.
Meet the rarely-sighted frilled shark. Described by some media outlets as “hideous”, the prehistoric creature looks part-eel, part-shark and shocked the fisherman when it was found in waters off south-eastern Victoria.
Last month, David Guillot, skipper of the trawler Western Alliance, was fishing near Lakes Entrance in Gippsland when he pulled up a specimen in water more than a kilometre deep.
Mr Guillot was fishing for dory and sea perch in waters about 1.1 kilometres deep when he came across the shark.
“I’ve been at sea for 30 years and I’ve never seen a shark look like that,” Mr 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 described the shark as being about 1.5 metres long and “like a large eel … the body was quite different to any other shark I’d ever seen”.
The species is more likely to be found in cool, temperate waters and seems to avoid warm water, said Mark Meekan, shark biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
