What it is
A living shark with its eyes set far apart, at the two ends of its wide, flat head.
Why it matters
The Tully monster's eyes sit on the two ends of a stiff bar that juts straight out sideways, the way a hammerhead's do. But the Tully monster is nothing else like a shark.
What the wide head does
With its eyes so far apart, a hammerhead sees much more of the world in front of it with both eyes at once, which is how animals judge distance. A 2009 study found the winghead shark, the hammerhead with the widest head, has about three times the overlap of an ordinary shark. Hammerheads also swing their heads from side to side as they swim, which fills in the blind spots.
A shark that eats its greens
The bonnethead, a small hammerhead, eats seagrass. In 2018, scientists fed captive bonnetheads a diet that was mostly seagrass and tracked its carbon into their blood and livers. They could digest it, which made the bonnethead the first shark known to be an omnivore, an animal that eats both plants and meat.