MONTEREY BAY, Calif. (KSBW) - A deep sea fish was caught on camera for the first time by the Monterey Bay Aquatic Research Institute.
The newly-released video shows the creature known as a ghost shark, a rare find.
It's believed to be the first-ever footage of the pointy-nose blue Chimaera, a deep sea fish also known as a ghost shark.
"This is kind of cool because you kind of open a little bit of a peek of what's going on in the deep sea of something that's been there, we just haven't known about it until they got this ROV footage," said Dr. David Ebert of the Pacific Shark Research Center
The unique fish was only found in the Southern Hemisphere.
In 2009, Mbari's remotely-controlled vehicle spotted it just a few miles off the coast of the Monterey Bay. It took some time to figure out what they were looking at.
"They were found by some of the geologists there," said Ebert. "They were looking at the rock formations there and they kept seeing this thing and they were like hey, what is this thing. Wow, we've never seen this before, so it's kind of like a little bit of luck that we became aware of it."
These ghost sharks live over 5,000 feet under the sea and have special features that allow them to find food in the dark.
Ebert says they go back nearly 400 million years and are just one of many new discoveries made possible by advancements in technology and collaboration between researchers.
"I often tell people there's about 1,200 species of sharks, and people don't realize how many species are out there," Ebert said. "And yet about 25 percent of them have only been discovered in the last decade, and so that's our whole program here, basically looking for lost sharks. We go out in the world and find these things that nobody even knew existed."
