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A RARE deep sea monster with razor sharp teeth and the ability to hypnotise its prey has recently washed up on a Californian beach.
Known as a Pacific footballfish, this horrifying creature became the second of its kind to be found on the shores of Crystal Cove Park in recent years.
The ghoulish-looking, pitch-black fish with a long stalk on its head is a species of anglerfish living in the deep sea worldwide.
However, it is only the females which possess the long stalk with bioluminescent tips used as a lure to entice prey in pitch-black water.
Regardless, experts have been left stunned at how it emerged from its habitat of around 2,000 to 3,300 feet beneath the surface.
A seasonal lifeguard discovered the dead anglerfish on Moro Beach close to the lifeguard headquarters, measuring about 14 inches from mouth to tail fin.
Some, however, can grow up to 24 inches long — about 10 times as large as some of their male counterparts.
The creature was later picked up by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for analysis, before it was handed over to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles.
This is so it can be “preserved and available for scientific research,” Michelle Horeczko, a senior environmental scientist supervisor with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, told the Los Angeles Times.
Made famous as the monster from the depths in Pixar’s Finding Nemo, it is incredibly rare for one to be found intact.
That’s according to Crystal Cove State Park officials, who wrote in a Facebook post that the beast had teeth like “pointed shards of glass”.
They added that the large mouth of the transparent Pacific footballfish “is capable of sucking up and swallowing prey the size of their own body.”
The males have evolved to latch onto the females and act as lifelong parasitic providers of “sperm on-tap”, according to Live Science.
The park officials also mentioned in their post that the males of some species merge their bloodstreams with their female hosts.
They eventually coalesce with the female “until nothing is left of their form but their testes for reproduction,” they added.
Elsewhere, a bizarre “mermaid” that seems to be part fish, part monkey, and part reptile is being probed by scientists in a bid to unravel its mysteries.
The mummy was brought back from Japan by an American sailor and donated to the Clark County Historical Society in Springfield, Ohio, in 1906.
But now its secrets could be revealed, after the so-called mermaid was X-rayed and CT scanned for the first time in an effort to decipher its true nature.
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