Revealed: Great Whites, Tigers and Bulls are the least of your worries!

Ready to get swallowed whole?

We surfers, we exist in a world inhabited by killers, cold-blooded killers, that put our opposable thumbs and sensitive brains to absolute shame. On land we dominate. We can out-metastasize, out-consume, out-engineer any damned species but in the water we are at mercy of the all-powerful shark.

Damned hippies get in the way of us out-consuming, out-engineering them, try as the Chinese and Japanese might, but even still, even best case scenario, the rare shark could always slip into any lineup, bite a surfer and create a frenzy.

The cost of doing business, I suppose, and we all have the slightest thought in the back of our head when we paddle a new spot especially if it is dark and creepy and we are alone, or at least I do having grown up in Oregon.

And that thought is either Great White, Tiger or Bull but we’ve been fearing the wrong beast all along, or at least I have, because there is a species swimming beneath the Whites, Tigers and Bulls that could eat all of them with one open-mouthed swallow. A species bigger than a submarine. A species with six gills instead of the pedestrian five and let’s learn about the bluntnose before she swallows us all with one open-mouthed swallow.

A team of researchers has captured incredible footage of a close encounter with an ancient species of shark known as the bluntnose sixgill.

The team, led by Dean Grubbs, from Florida State University, were conducting dives in a submersible called “Nadir” as part of an expedition organized by OceanX to tag one of the sharks in their deep-sea environment.

During one of the dives, the team were fortunate to come up close and personal with a huge female bluntnose—=one of the largest sharks in the world—which one of the researchers in the video can be heard describing as “definitely bigger than the sub is long.”

The sub crew were left in a state of awe by the encounter: “My goodness that is amazing,” one of the team comments, while another can be heard saying, “This is a monster. She is huge.” At one point the shark even tries to nibble on the spear gun attached to Nadir.

The bluntnose (Hexanchus griseus) is part of an old lineage of sharks that can be traced back 180 million years in the fossil record. In fact, it represents perhaps the oldest living lineage of sharks in the world, the researchers say. They are highly distinctive due to the fact that they have six large conspicuous gill slits, hence the name. Most sharks only have five.

See. I told you.

Scary.