Ghost shark caught on camera for the first time

The odd-looking fish, which sports a retractable sex organ on its head, has been spotted in the Northern Hemisphere for the first time, according to a report in National Geographic News.

Also called chimaeras, ghost sharks are dead-eyed, wing-finned fish rarely seen by people.

Relatives of sharks and rays, these deep-sea denizens split off from these other groups some 300 million years ago. Even though ghost sharks have been gliding through the depths since long before the dinosaurs, we still know very little about them.

Now, video recently released by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California has shone new light on these mysterious creatures, reports National Geographic.

In 2009, the institute sent a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, on several dives to depths of up to 6,700 feet in waters off California and Hawaii. They weren't looking for ghost sharks: "The guys doing the video were actually geologists," says Dave Ebert, program director for the Pacific Shark Research Center at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories.

"Normally, people probably wouldn't have been looking around in this area, so it's a little bit of dumb luck," he says.