“I’ve never seen anything quite like this before,” says Alan Tennyson, a curator at the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington.

He’s referring to an incredible find – a large albatross that appears to have died after swallowing a shark whole.

This northern royal albatross, Diomedea sanfordi, washed ashore on the coast at Wellington where it was found by Hokimate Harwood, a researcher at the museum.


But it wasn’t until staff inspected the specimen in the lab that they noticed something fishy – a shark tail poking out of the bird’s neck, to be precise.

“We were really surprised to see the shark tail projecting out of the bird’s neck, but we were even more surprised when we realised that the whole shark was still intact inside the albatross,” says Tennyson.

Upon closer inspection, they identified this as a seal shark (Dalatias licha), a deep sea species with a particularly vicious-looking smile. At 67 centimetres long, the shark took up almost the whole length of the bird’s body cavity.

The albatross isn’t exactly small – at 115 cm long and with a wingspan of 3 metres, it is one of the world’s biggest seabirds.

But this poor individual seemed to have fallen foul of its last meal. The shark was probably already dead after being dredged up and discarded by a deep water fishing trawler.

“Albatrosses are mainly scavengers but they have very sharp beaks so can normally slice up bigger prey items before swallowing them,” says Tennyson. “This shark had very leathery rough skin and perhaps the albatross assumed that it could slice it up when it grabbed it, but ended up swallowing the whole thing – with tragic consequences.”

Tennyson and colleagues speculate that the shark got stuck inside the bird, probably choking it to death.

Both the shark and bird will now be turned into skeletons that the museum can use for research and to identify fossil remains.

(Image: Alan Tennyson © Te Papa)