That's embarrassing!
For one, the scientists didn't actuallyrecover the specimen. Instead, they were working off of a single photo, taken by a citizen scientist who claimed to have stumbled on the shark's corpse washed up on the beach of a Greek island.
"After reading the article in detail, I had doubts about the record," Jürgen Pollerspöck, a shark expert who recently co-authored a comment published in the same journal responding to the dodgy paper, told theAs Pollerspöck observed, the suspect specimen only had four gill slits rather than the expected five. Its snout, meant to be stiff, was found sagging.
If the specimen were real, it'd be by far the smallest ever found. According to the researcher's estimates — despite the photograph featuring no scale for size — it was no more than seven or eight inches long. Sounding like a toy to you?you can buy. All told, it's not hard to see why experts are skeptical — or why the original authors ended up retracting the paper.
"Fishing in the Mediterranean has a long tradition," Pollerspöck added. "It would be a surprise if such a large animal had remained undiscovered until today."
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