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Hydrolagus melanophasma is a slippery customer. It is a new species, in that scientists identified it for the first time this month, but it is also an old species, probably branching off from modern sharks 400 million years ago, and collected in jars by museums since the 1960s, writes National Geographic News.
And it was not easy to classify. “They have some shark characteristics and they have some that are very non-shark,” Doug Long of the California Academy of Sciences and an author on the Zootaxa article classifying the species told Wired News. The creature flaps its fins like a ray, is shaped more like a modern shark, and the males feature what Wired News calls a “most intriguing” retractable sexual organ dangling from its head. In fact, the researchers classified it as a member of the chimera order, also known as ghost sharks.
The team confirmed its identification of the new species, based on 9 museum examples, by identifying a living individual in footage from a submersible in the Sea of Cortez (see the second photo).
The first page of the research article is available for free: [pdf].
Photos: Kelsey James (top); Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (bottom).