Posted on 09/23/2009 8:37:52 AM PDT by JoeProBono
California has a new star, the Eastern Pacific black ghostshark.
But the newly identified species prefers to stay out of the sun—and the spotlight. And with a club-like sex organ on its forehead, the male ghostshark isn't likely to get any leading man roles.
Pictured alive underwater (top) and preserved in a museum collection (bottom), the new ghostshark uses winglike fins to "fly" through its dark habitat, thousands of feet deep off the coasts of California and Mexico's Baja California peninsula, a new study says. (See map.)
The ghostshark seems to have flown under the scientific radar too. Since the 1960s experts have been finding specimens of the strange, 3-foot-long (0.9-meter-long) fish, which ended up nameless in museum collections around the world.
It wasn't until after a team recently searched through shelves of "dead pickled fish" that the Eastern Pacific black ghostshark was recognized as its own new species, said study co-author Douglas Long, chief curator in natural sciences at the Oakland Museum of California>. The specimens' unique proportions, precisely measured, gave the fish away as a separate species of ghostshark.
Ghostsharks in Chimerical Company
The shark-like animal belongs to the mysterious and little-studied chimeras, perhaps the oldest group of fish alive today.
These "living fossils" branched off from sharks about 400 million years ago. They may have survived by adapting to extreme deep-sea environments, Long said.
My neighbor was talking to someone on the phone in his garage. From his garage I heard him say “Where were you, dickhead.”
I am going to have to rethink what he meant.
Think he has to tell the female sharks “HEY! My eyes are over HERE!!!”?
Mmmm......... Jeff, what is your middle name?
He’ll be very popular...
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