She replied that it 'does superficially look a lot like Mola tecta,' though she needed a closer look at parts of the fish to figure out what it was. He flagged the post for Nyegaard, the scientist who discovered the hoodwinker. 'It'd be quite a turn up for the books if it really is M. Ralph Foster, a fish expert at the South Australian Museum, saw Turner's post on iNaturalist and said he was puzzled. They dive deep into the open ocean to feed, then pop up onto the surface to bask in the sun. So they're flat, and they've lost their tail, completely, and they just have sharp fins that stick up off the top and the bottom that they use to flap kind of like a bird's wings.' Their faces have a 'permanently surprised expression,' he says. The creature is huge, he adds, but 'they're basically shaped like a disc. 'It's the strangest fish I've ever seen,' he says. He uploaded photos of the animal onto a website called iNaturalist – a site where scientists and amateurs alike can post photos of plants and animals they observe, to help researchers track where species live. 'I went down there with my family, my young four-year-old son and my wife, as soon as I got off work to just check it out because I wanted him to get to see a Mola mola up close,' Turner told NPR. Thomas Turner, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, heard from a colleague last week about what they thought was a dead Mola mola that had washed up at UCSB's Coal Oil Point Reserve.

The hoodwinker has only been found in the Southern Hemisphere, aside from just one known example that washed up in The Netherlands in 1889. The more common Mola mola ocean sunfish is known to swim in the Santa Barbara Channel. Nyegaard, a sunfish expert, discovered and described the Mola tecta sunfish - commonly known as the hoodwinker sunfish - in 2017.

'I literally, nearly fell off my chair,' Marianne Nyegaard of Murdoch University in Australia said in a statement. This was in Santa Barbara, California - much further north than anyone expected to find it.

Stumbling upon a seven-foot-long sunfish while walking on a beach is already pretty surprising.īut what researchers initially thought was a common type of sunfish turned out to be much rarer – a newly discovered species thought to make its home almost entirely in the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere.

Giant flat fish