A relative of sharks and rays, the deep sea long-nosed chimaera fish possesses an exceptionally long paddle snout, and one of the very rare creatures was recently caught in Canadian waters and identified by a University of Windsor researcher, CBC News reports.
A photo of the mysterious, rarely caught fish that lives 3,000 feet below the ocean's surface has gone viral online shortly after it was posted to Facebook by Jutai Korgak.
"Only one of these fish has previously been documented from the Hudson Strait," Nigel Hussey, a researcher who works with the Ocean Tracking Network, told CBC News. "Potentially, if we fish deeper, maybe between 1,000 and 2,000 meters, we could find that's there's actually quite a lot of them there. We just don't know."
The long-nosed chimaera, which can grow up to three feet in length and is physically similar to a goblin shark (though it is not a shark), was picked up by a fishing boat in the Davis Strait, which lies between mid-western Greenland and Nunavut, Canada's Baffin Island.
The strange-looking fish makes its home in the deep sea, making it more difficult to scientists to study, and as a result, not much is known about it, although five species of the Rhinochimaeridae have been identified in three genera. In some parts of the world, long-nosed chimaera are a delicacy.
