These ocean depths, where the sun's rays cannot penetrate, belong to mysterious chimeras. One of them is a ghost shark with bunny teeth, massive head and fins-wings.
It is such an individual - the 50th species of such sharks - that scientists have found and studied, reports Live Science. The one meter long creature is the second largest of all ghost shark species ever discovered.
“The ghost shark, Hydrolagus erithacus, has a rather bulky head and a narrow body that flows into a thin whip-shaped tail. The front of her torso is quite massive,”says Christine Valovich, PhD student at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.
Like its relatives, the shark has "rabbit" teeth. For this feature, it was attributed to the genus Hydrolagus, which translates as "water rabbit" or "water hare". The second part of the name erithacus belongs to the genus of robins, or robins (in English they are called robin), it was chosen in honor of the researcher Leslie Robin, who helped Valovich study the ghost shark.
Hydrolagus erithacus is not like other hydrolags: it is larger in size, and its color is much darker than that of its relatives. Despite the name, hydrolags are not sharks. Most likely, these are distant relatives of sharks and rays: Hydrolagus erithacus literally fly on "wings" across the sea. Scientists call these animals chimeras.
Most of these creatures live at very great depths, so it is extremely inconvenient to study them. However, Valovich managed to find out why the ghost shark needs "rabbit" teeth: this is how the predator opens the shells of crabs and other crustaceans that feed on the seabed.
There are three known species of hydrolags: H. africanus, H. mirabilis, and H. cf. trolli. They live in the regions of the tropical and temperate zones, 17 out of 24 species of hydrolags are present in all oceans, with the exception of the Arctic and Antarctic. H. erithacus is found between South Africa and Antarctica, in the southeastern Atlantic and southwestern Indian Ocean.
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