Shark Week Stalks NH Woods?
Posted by: Loren Coleman on August 8th, 2011
Locals in the small town of Milton, New Hampshire are trying to figure out how a six-foot shark ended up in the region’s woods. Floyd Ellis told local station WMUR that his brother found the decomposing blue shark on Thursday. The closest ocean beach is a 45-minute drive away, so authorities think fishers without a license may have caught it there and then dumped it in the woods to decompose when they realized they might get in trouble for the catch. Miltonites at a local pond told the station they had never heard of anything like it.
One man suggested that the incident was likely a real-world extension of the Discovery Channel’s annual summer roundup of shark-themed programming.
“It’s totally Shark Week,” the man said.
Thanks to Marvin Pine for the news tip.
Update:
Andy Finkle sends along a new photo (above) and another news treatment (here).
The blue shark (Prionace glauca) is a species of requiem shark, family Carcharhinidae, that inhabits deep waters in the world’s temperate and tropical oceans. Preferring cooler waters, blue sharks migrate long distances, for example from New England to South America. They are not known to inhabit the waters of inland New Hampshire, however.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Wow, what a horrible waste. The poor shark.
Makes me think of the old Saturday Night Live skit about the “Land Shark!”
A couple of my friends caught a similar sized shark a few years back and put it in the local town fountain as a joke it died of course but got front page news the next day when it was discovered.
Awful. Just awful.
Here’s the Landshark: the most dangerous cryptid ever known!
That’s a heck of a fish fall.
I have to wonder what these fishing fellows are thinking (or maybe its drinking). Why do you bring things like this home with you if you don’t have a plan for them (either eating or taxidermy)
I know a few years ago a bonnethead shark was found (dead, of course) in one of our Pennsylvanian streams. Besides the horrible death for a salt water creature, think about the sort of contamination you could be introducing to your local water supply. At least in this case it was dumped in the woods for scavengers and not in a local stream/pond/reservoir. But really, fellows, a little forethought (or catch and release) would be nice.