Posted by Scott Tanner on Friday, March 4, 2016

Early in March, Scott Tanner, a commercial fisherman in Nova Scotia, recently returned from “the longest trip ever,” as he said on Facebook, and posted a few photos. In the set, he casually included one of the weirder, grosser-looking fish—see above—to ever have been fished out of the ocean.

Tanner, at 23, is a relatively young fisherman, but even his older colleagues had never seen anything like this. “Everyone was pretty amazed by it,” he told the Herald News.

What is this beautiful monstrosity? 

As far as anyone can tell, it looks to be a longnose chimaera, which is distantly related to sharks and enjoys shrimp. These fish are rarely seen by humans, since, like many fish that look like they’ve crawled out of a hell pit to haunt your dreams, this one lives deep in the ocean, where looks matter less. (To be fair, no creature looks it best when it’s dead.)

They do show up in fishermen’s nets occasionally, though: another was caught in 2013, off the coast of northern Canada.

Here’s what this type of fish looks like deep in the ocean:

Not so bad, right? 

Bonus find: A frog with yellow eyebrows 

Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.