Meet the Deep-Sea Devil Fish's New Snaggletoothed Cousin
With its curled lip and toothy smile, the new species of anglerfish reminds its discoverer of a "bad dream."
Many deep-sea animals look like they mean business: They can wield needlelike teeth, spit glowing mucus, or sport extendable jaws. But even amongst such extravagantly ugly company, a new species of deep-sea anglerfish stands out.
Dubbed Lasiognathus dinema, researchers stumbled on this beauty in 2011 while surveying a section of the northern Gulf of Mexico impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
"At the time of the spill, we didn't have a lot of data [on] what lived deep in the Gulf," says Tracey Sutton, a fish expert at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asked scientists to fix that. So Sutton and colleagues spent late 2010 and much of 2011 dragging
