海角大神

In a rare serendipitous sighting, scientists captured videos of an eerie bluish grey shark swimming in Northern Hemisphere waters.

The "ghost shark" captured on film is actually not a shark, but a chimaera 鈥� a relative that split off evolutionarily from its toothy cousins about 300 million years ago. These deep-water creatures are only known to live near New Zealand and Australia, although marine biologists say that this video footage could indicate a greater range than they previously realized.

鈥淣ormally, people probably wouldn鈥檛 have been looking around in this area, so it鈥檚 a little bit of dumb luck,鈥� program director for the Pacific Shark Research Center at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories Dave Ebert, according to the National Geographic.

Researchers didn鈥檛 set out to find Hydrolagus trolli, or the pointy-nosed blue chimaera, when they sent a remote operated vehicle to explore the deep waters off of California and Hawaii in 2009. Instead, the scientists involved in the project were geologists - but they hit a marine biology motherlode anyway.

The chimaera is also known as the rabbitfish, ratfish, or ghost shark, and prefers the colder waters of the deep ocean. Physically, these ghost sharks are somewhat of a throwback to their marine dinosaur ancestors, with eerie lines tracing its head and body.

The footage from those dives was finally released this week by the Monteray Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and if the creature featured in the videos is confirmed to be a pointy-nosed blue chimaera, it will be the first time scientists have spotted one in the Northern Hemisphere.

鈥淭he only way we can collect these species is by trawling,鈥� Millersville University chimaera expert Dominique Didier told National Geographic. 鈥淪o, it's like a snapshot. Imagine trying to understand species distribution in Lake Michigan and you sample the lake using a Dixie cup. Trawling the ocean is like that.鈥�

鈥淚 suspect many species are wide-ranging鈥� we just don't have the data.鈥�

Researchers published a study on the pointy-nosed blue chimaera in the journal Marine Biodiversity Records this week.

It has been a good year for shark researchers, with north Atlantic shark researchers making the聽first-ever discovery of a great white shark nursery in the waters off the coast of New York, as 海角大神 reported:

In January, marine biologists also discovered a sand shark nursery in New York waters, close to Long Island.