Jul 15, 2010

Deepwater Shark Diet Consists of - OMG LOOK at that thing!

The folks over at Discovery News headlined their story "Deepwater Shark Diet Includes Other Sharks." I clicked thinking this might be an item for my other blog, but it turns out that the real story is, have you ever SEEN such a thing?


Its creepy skin and having its eyes where its nostrils should be might be impressively ugly enough, if that weren't overshadowed by the fact that its eyes are totally the wrong size and in fact seem to come from some other animal entirely.

This amazing creature appears to be a kitefin shark. I determined this via the exhaustive research technique of Googling the species names mentioned and looking at the pictures, which definitely beats what the scientists in the article had to do: they collected the semi-digested stomach contents of sharks for DNA analysis.

Another scientist working in this ugly corner of science told Discovery News that this technique is an important breakthrough:
He hopes future DNA research might shed light on mysterious "lumps of blubber" that are "scooped from living cetaceans" by sharks, or "scavenged from dead ones."

Oh, yum!

-Your queasy friend,
Wombat (No Relation)

10 comments:

  1. thats one weird looking motherf--ker!!

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  2. It definitely is odd in a very ugly way! Aren't you grateful your eyes are where they should be?

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  3. AnonymousJuly 15, 2010

    If you think that's ugly, you should see its little cousin, the cookie-cutter shark. Not only is it uglier, but its deep, circular bite is the ugliest of all.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_cutter_shark

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  4. Scroll down a bit here for quite a lovely angle on the cookie cutter shark
    http://weirdimals.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/cookie-cutter-shark/

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  5. AnonymousJuly 15, 2010

    His head looks like one of those weasel parasites from the movie Dreamcatcher.

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  6. AnonymousJuly 16, 2010

    Ugh! It gave me a shock when the page loaded, looks like something from a nightmare..

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  7. At first I thought someone had drawn with marker on their finger. And when I looked again - EWWWWWWW

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  8. AnonymousJuly 17, 2010

    It looks like the opposite of the horror cliche vagina dentata.

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  9. Actually I think the opposite of that would be the naked mole rat. It even feels exactly right to the touch.

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  10. its eyes are so big, it looks like some realistic versioin of pokemon or something. Anime like!

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