Moose-eating Shark Beached in Canada, Saved by Locals

A beached Greenland shark was saved by a pair of passersby who pulled part of a moose carcass out of the shark's mouth and pushed the fish back into the sea.

The shark beached itself on Newfoundland's northeast coast the weekend of Nov. 16, apparently after biting off more that it could chew. According to Canada's CBC news, Derrick Chaulk was driving near the shore when he saw the beached shark. He parked and went down to the water to find the 8-foot-long shark still alive, but with "a large chunk of moose hide protruding from its mouth."

Chaulk said the hunk of moose still had its fur and lining and was about two feet long.

Another local man, Jeremy Ball, arrived on the scene and dislodged the moose carcass from the choking shark's mouth.

"A couple yanks and it just came right out," Ball told the CBC.

The two men set about getting the shark into deeper water by tying a rope to its tail and dragging it back to sea.

"He pulled the rope, and I pushed with my boot," Chaulk said, "and between the two of us we got him out into deeper water."

After getting the shark into about a foot of water, the men left the fish, watching to see whether it could save itself. The men told the CBC that the it took a few minutes, "Then all of a sudden, the water started coming out of his gills and he started breathing."

It was rare for a Greenland shark to be as far south as Newfoundland. The slow-moving bottom-dwellers live farther north than any other shark species. Greenland sharks can grow about as big as a great white shark, growing as long as 21 feet and weighing as many as 2,200 pounds. According to the CBC, the sharks spend much of their lives blinded by parasites feeding on its corneas.

Shark ecologist Ian Hamilton told CBC news that the Greenland shark is not usually know for eating moose. "I don't think a Greenland shark has the capacity to eat a full-grown moose ... primarily because it lives on land, obviously," adding that the shark was probably scavenged a moose calf that had drowned. The sharks are said to go for long periods of time without food, so when it finds a meal its tends to gorge itself, which likely led to the shark choking .

After publishing the story about the moose-eating shark Thursday, the CBC said the story went viral, prompting people from around the world to chime in with Tweets, animations and pictures of their own, many of which can be seen here.