A fish shaped like a cartoon dragon? While Fedorstov was fishing in the Norwegian Sea, he came across a dragon-like fish with large eyes, a long tail, and a light pink appearance.
As usual for the 39-year-old photographer, he took a photo of the fish and shared it on Instagram with his more than 650,000 followers. He captioned his post with a quote from GF Lovecraft, which reads: “It’s one thing to chase something with no name, but it’s another thing to find it.”
The publication on the social network Instagram had thousands and thousands of “likes”, whose commenters tried, in the comments section, to identify the strange sea creature. To most, it was a real life cartoon flying dragon fish.
Later, it was identified as a chimera, a cartilaginous fish also called a “ghost shark”. These creatures, the ghost sharks ( Callorhinchus milii ) are unique members of the chimera that arose from sharks more than 40 million years ago. According to the Florida Museum, these creatures can be easily identified due to their large eyes and club-shaped snouts that they use to search the sand for food.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), this species is classified as “least concern” , so the species is abundant throughout its geographic range.
The fisherman commented: ‘All types of fish are beautiful in their own way. I can’t say they are ‘scary’ or ‘ugly’. People are very interested in unusual sea creatures.”
