Fishermen were left horrified after they managed to reel in a massive shark, only to realise it had been eaten by something even larger.
A jaw-dropping video shows fishermen, Sammy Hitzke and his friend Shaun Whale, from Australia, struggling for four-and-a-half hours before eventually landing the whopper.
After hours of fighting to reel in the beast, they were left horrified when they discovered its body had been completely chewed up.
In the video, posted on Sammy’s YouTube he hauls the dead shark up onto the ship.
He said: "There he is. It’s big and long. It’s a shark. It looks like the shark has been sharked. I don’t know what's going on there. It’s a massive thresher."
The fishermen were left stunned when they pulled it onboard to discover most of its body was missing after it had been attacked by another, even larger predator.
Sammy said: "This is epic, proper epic. He’s got three-quarters of himself missing. That is a proper monster of the deep."
Later, Shaun described the half-eaten monstrosity as the “find of a lifetime”.
He said: "I’m absolutely exhausted but this might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in the ocean,
"I’ve done a lot of fishing, spent a lot of time out on the big blue, and not once did I think I’d find a thresher shark eaten by something that, I imagine, was absolutely massive.
"This is a true predator of the depths – now he's just food for another shark. That is a find of a lifetime."
Since the jaw-dropping footage was uploaded two days ago it has already been watched over 130,000 times and attracted hundreds of comments.
One viewer wrote: "That was sick! Can't imagine the muscle pain you guys had the next two days."
A second commented: "Wow! It's not just the size and species that is incredible, it's the circumstances surrounding the captures."
Meanwhile, other commenters theorised it possibly could have been a squid responsible for the death and mauling of the thresher shark.
"The shark appears to have been attacked by a giant squid. The damage doesn't look like it was done by another shark," said one.
Someone else wrote: "Could have been a shark that originally chomped the thresher, but there was 100% squid involvement at some point because sharks don't leave just the backbone like that."
Thresher sharks are listed as vulnerable to extinction by the World Conservation Union.
