From Caribbean360

FLORIDA, United States, Friday May 9, 2014 – On April 19, about halfway through an 18-day fishing trip, Carl Moore and his crewmates got the shock of their lives off the coast of Key West, Florida, when they hauled up a massive prehistoric-looking beast in a net full of shrimp from about 2,000 feet (610 m) of water.

Moore, who has been shrimping the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico for 50 years, has “caught so much weird stuff: sawfish, Bahamian anglefish, loggerback turtles weighing 1,000 to 1,500 pounds.”

But when the pink coloured monster with its dagger-like teeth spilled out of his trawling net, Moore felt “disbelief.”

“I didn’t even know what it was,” Moore told The Houston Chronicle. “I didn’t get the tape measure out, because that thing’s got some wicked teeth, they could do some damage.”

Fortunately, Moore was able to take pictures of the creature using the camera on a cell phone he had recently bought to share pictures with his grandson.

The fishermen released the fearsome-looking beast and subsequently reported the sighting to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where shark expert John Carlson was alerted.

The deep sea monster turned out to be a goblin shark, only the second of the species ever caught in the Gulf of Mexico, and the first since 2000, according to Carlson.

Goblin sharks do resemble some prehistoric species, and Carlson said Moore made a “pretty important find.” They’re rarely seen anywhere, although the coast of Japan has yielded the most recorded sightings.

“As a whole we know very little about these animals — how old they get, how fast they grow, where their nurseries are,” the NOAA research biologist told Live Science. Scientists haven’t done a lot of deep-water surveys, so they don’t know if the sharks are really rare, or just haven’t been seen, he added.

The Key West goblin shark was thought to have been slightly smaller than the first one seen in the Gulf, which at 18 feet (5.5 m) long was the largest ever recorded, according to Carlson. In contrast, most of the goblin sharks seen off Japan are about 7 or 8 feet (2.1 to 2.4 m) in length.

Carlson also noted that the new Key West shark was most likely female, because it lacked male sexual appendages known as claspers.

The first and only other goblin shark sighting in the Gulf was in 2000, when one got caught in a ghost crab net off the coast of Louisiana. The only other sighting in the western North Atlantic Ocean was near a seamount east of Bermuda in the 1970s, Carlson said.

Goblin sharks are usually found between water depths of 1,000 and 3,000 feet (300 and 900 m), and are thought to feed on fish and squid, spearing them with their sharp teeth, the marine biologist said.

According to Carlson, sharks are an ancient type of fish that predate the dinosaurs, but goblin sharks are a more recent lineage.

“They look more prehistoric, because they’re adapted to life in the deep sea,” he explained.

For more on this story go to: http://www.caribbean360.com/news/deep-sea-monster-caught-off-florida?utm_source=Caribbean360%20Newsletters&utm_campaign=e3e7bcbe0c-Vol_9_Issue_093_News5_9_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_350247989a-e3e7bcbe0c-39393477