Although we may not have been lucky enough to find Martians on Mars, there are some rather alien creatures closer to home.
This week, a curious-looking thing was washed up on Canterbury beach in Christchurch, New Zealand. Hanna Mary was the first person to discover the stranded creature and initially thought it was a piece of plastic wrap or a space visitor.
"My first thought was that it was something extraterrestrial, but I was more than anything fascinated," Mary told The New Zealand Herald.
With his skeletal physique, razor-sharp fangs, and piercing hooks, it looks like he's stepped through a time warp from the Jurassic era to today.
To identify the puzzle animal, Mary brought it to a taxidermist, but could not answer. And so she turned to Facebook friends and family. Here she was a bit luckier.
"I uploaded the photos on Facebook and we made all the assumptions," she said.
But whenever they tried to reconcile the animal with the guess, it did not quite fit.
"I suppose it's a kind of deep-sea ice skating, maybe a Bathyraja abyssicola that may have been picked up by a trawler," Mary added.
Fortunately, Malcolm Francis, fishery and marine ecologist at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, was ready to give some answers - and it turned out that Mary was on the right track. It was a kind of skate. In particular, a male Dipturus nasutus (aka New Zealand skate), which is often found in the waters off the southern island of New Zealand.
"It's like a shallow shark, it has a skeleton of cartilage," he said. "They spend a lot of time on the ground."
According to fishingmag.co.nz, New Zealand's online fishing magazine, they can be found up to 100 meters off the coast and are often picked up by fishermen who sell their wings to local fishmongers and supermarkets. They are usually brown and have a broken white underside and are up to a length of about 70 centimeters.
These spooky "claws" are actually Alar spikes that are used by male skates to hold onto females during mating.
Francis suspects that this individual was caught by a fisherman who threw it overboard before it was washed up on the beach.
Find that weird? In Roman Fedortsov's Instagram, you'll find more joys of the deepsea, including monstrous dragonfish, prehistoric-looking sea cucumbers and a tongue-eater.
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