An exciting scientific record of a rare species in a new place might actually just be a photo of a plastic toy.
Last year, scientists published a paper in which they documented a supposed juvenile goblin shark specimen, found dead and washed up on a beach in Greece.
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Yet no one had ever published evidence of a goblin shark in the Mediterranean Sea, until this study.
“I think it’s very possible that it could be [a] degraded plastic toy,” Joana Sipe, a plastic degradation researcher at Duke University, told Gizmodo in a phone call.
Greg Merrill, a Duke University graduate student who studies plastic pollution in marine mammals, also believed the photographed “animal” was a plastic model.
“I am not a shark expert; I study whales and plastic,” he wrote to Gizmodo in an email. »