New Sharks

From The Daily Review...

It is amazing what you find lying around the bottom of the ocean, as St. Mary's College professor Douglas Long has discovered. Long was part of a team of researchers who this year identified two new species of deep-sea fishes, unusual-looking sharks that broke off on their own evolutionary path more than 320 million years ago. The creatures -- named the Galapagos and whitespot ghost sharks -- were found more than 1,200 feet underwater near the Galapagos Islands in 1995, sucked through a vacuum tube into a research submarine. Long and his team spent more than a decade making sure they were new species before publishing their results in the journal Zootaxa in October and December. "They've been on their own branch of the evolutionary tree since well before the dinosaurs," said Long...Among the first to actually see both new species was Long's Academy of Sciences colleague, John McCosker, who found the Galapagos ghost shark on his 50th birthday in 1995. Long, who examined both animals in the Bay Area, honored his friend by giving the fish the Latin name .