A photo of this bizarre, long-nosed creature was posted to CBC North's Facebook page two weeks ago when it went viral. Fisherman had pulled it from the Davis Strait between Canada's Baffin Island and western Greenland.
Though some Internet observers wondered whether the fisherman had found a goblin shark, University of Windsor researcher Nigel Hussey originally identified the specimen as a "long-nosed chimaera," though he later clarified the species in an email to The Huffington Post.
"We think this species is a knifenose chimaera (Rhinochimaera atlantica). There is another species which they call the longnose so we don't wish for confusion!" he wrote.
The rare species belongs to the Rhinochimaeridae family of fish, named after the Greek terms for "nose and "monster."
"Only one of these fish has previously been documented from the Hudson Strait," Hussey said. "Potentially, if we fish deeper, maybe between 1,000 and 2,000 metres, we could find that's there's actually quite a lot of them there. We just don't know."
