Feared for its predatory nature, the shark is one of those animals that inspires respect and fascination in equal measure. Far from its reputation as a hunter, a small specimen surprised everyone in India with an unusual characteristic: it had two heads.
Nitin Patil is a fisherman from Palghar, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, and like every day, on Friday he was preparing to harvest his livelihood from the waters of the Arabian Sea. Unbeknownst to him, nature would surprise him with a display of its uniqueness.
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Among his catches, Patil quickly spotted one specimen that stood out from the rest for its rarity. It was nothing less than a 15-centimeter shark with two heads.
Umesh Palekar, another of the fishermen who saw the small shark caught by Pail, clarified to the local press that the photographs were shared with researchers to determine the cause of the deformity. “We’ve never seen anything like this before. We believe one of the large sharks we saw in the area may have given birth to this specimen,” he stated.
Specialists from the Mumbai-based Council for Fish Resources Research (ICAR-CMFRI) maintain that there are no records of such a discovery along the entire coast of Maharashtra state. According to Dr. KV Akhilesh of ICAR-CMFRI, the specimen could be a flathead shark (Scoliodon laticaudus) or a sand dogfish (Rhizoprionodon terraenovae).