Rare, Odd-Looking Ghost Fish Captured on Video

The strange-looking deep sea ghost shark was filmed alive for the first time on video and, in an unexpected place: The North Pacific Ocean. The odd-looking fish, referred to as the pointy blue chimaera and a distant relative of the shark and the ray, was previously only known to live in the southern Pacific Ocean off of Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia.

It was videotaped for the first time ever in 2009 by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute during a series of remotely operated vehicle deep-sea surveys.

The male chimaeras have retractable sexual appendages on their foreheads. The fish are wing-finned, dead-eyed, have dots around their head and no teeth. They are blue-gray to pale blue in color and have pointed snouts and look ghost-like, thus the name.

"The guys doing the video were actually geologists," Dave Ebert, program director for the Pacific Shark Research Center at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, told The National Geographic.

"Normally, people probably wouldn’t have been looking around in this area, so it's a little bit of dumb luck."

Related Stories

• Scientists Uncover Christ's Burial Slab in Jerusalem 
  
• Scientists Grow Mouse Eggs From Stem Cells in Lab