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Credit to Author: Samantha Cole| Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2017 20:08:40 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n When researchers caught a frilled shark<\/a> off the coast of Portugal last summer, it made headlines as a rare, weird sighting. With a slithering, serpentine body and 300 teeth, the shark and its ancestors have served as inspiration for sea monster mythology for millennia. This is what you fear touching your foot when you\u2019re swimming in murky ocean water. <\/p>\n But while it might be horror-myth material, the frilled shark is not all that uncommon. <\/p>\n Scientists from Portugal\u2019s Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere caught the five-foot-long frilled shark at a depth of 2,300 feet off the Algarve coast, according to Sic Noticias TV<\/a>, a national channel. The researchers didn\u2019t set out to find a \u201cliving fossil\u201d on that expedition; they caught the shark while studying commercial fishing practices, according to the BBC<\/a>, which calls it \u201crarely caught.\u201d <\/p>\n That isn\u2019t entirely accurate. <\/p>\n Little is known about the species, sure. It exists so far below the surface that when one is pulled up as bycatch in a fisher\u2019s net\u2014it’s thought to hang out around 1,500 to 3,000 feet deep<\/a>\u2014the change in pressure kills it. But that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean it\u2019s an incredibly rare find. A shark researcher unintentionally caught 28 frilled sharks<\/a> while trying to catch goblin sharks in Tokyo Bay last March. Occasionally frilled shark ends up in Japan\u2019s fish markets. One specimen thoroughly freaked out a fisherman in Australia in 2015<\/a>, who claimed it was alive at the time and that it tried to take a chunk out of a deckhand. <\/p>\n