Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Actor reports "prehistoric" fish

Every once in a while, swimmers and divers report running into very strange things. Actor Ving Rhames is one of those people. What he saw while snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef scared him out of the water - for good. He says, "I saw something I don't know what it was to this day. My mind couldn't relate to what it was... If I saw it and knew it was a shark I wouldn't be as afraid but I saw something that looked prehistoric and I haven't been snorkeling since. It was a combination of a catfish and something with a large oblongish-type head. It came towards me and I froze and it just went away. I haven't done any scuba diving since either."
COMMENT: I don't know what Rhames saw, as the description does not bring any known species quickly to mind (ok, possibly, just possibly, the bizarre and very rare megamouth shark?), but he makes an important point. We don't know everything in the water. It may be we know "most of the big stuff," as one scientist put it, but we don't know all the big stuff. No marine scientist would stand behind a claim that we do.

1 comment:

Jake said...

This reminds me of a remark from Sebastian Junger's book The Perfect Storm. Deep sea fisherman Charlie Reed describes catching stuff scientists don't have in books--"monstrous-looking things." All the more reason for the oceans to be explored in earnest.