Monster-Like Fish With 'Human Teeth' Caught In Russian River

A fisherman in Russia has caught a large fish with what looks like a full set of human teeth in its mouth.

Aleks Korobov, 50, was fishing at the Northern Dvina River in the Arkhangelsk Oblast district, northwest Russia, when he caught what he thought was a normal bream.

While checking the fish over, he found it looked very healthy, apart from an unusual looking mouth. A video produced by Russian news website NTV Television, shows the catch.

'I opened its gills which were nice and red but I noticed the mouth wasn't right for a bream and when I opened it I nearly dropped the thing in surprise,' Korobov said.

Korobov rushed to tell his friends what he had caught, but none of them believed him until he showed them the fish.

'We know Aleks can tell some tall tales but when he came in and said he had a fish with human teeth we thought he'd certainly been drinking,' his friend Ppal Anton Efimov said. 'But then he got it out and we were totally shocked... None of us had ever seen anything like it in our lives.'

The Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography carried out an autopsy on the fish and found that it was not a typical bream, as first thought.

'We are convinced it is a member of the Piranha family, and that it is a herbivore piranha, not one of the meat eating ones you see in films,' said industry expert Gennady Dvorykankin.

On how such a fish ended up in the river, he added, 'It is very unlikely that it made its way from its natural tropical waters to our Arctic and then into the river, so we can only assume it was dumped by an owner of exotic fish,' he added.

The fish is most probably a pacu, a South American tropical fish that is related to the piranha. However, a pacu is slightly larger than a piranha and they have different teeth.

The pacu have been mistakenly labelled as testicle biters, after jokes made by the media on a specimen found in Denmark, were taken seriously by the public.