It may be one of the oldest fish ever caught.
Scratch that. May have been.
When Henry Liebman hauled in a shortraker rockfish from the icy Alaskan waters near the town of Sitka, he brought this critter's remarkable run to an end, LiveScience reports.
An insurance salesman from Seattle, Liebman plans to have his catch mounted -- but not before a sample is sent to a laboratory to test its age, according to the Daily Mail.
In the Sitka Sentinel, Troy Tidingco, a manager from the Department of Fish and Game, suggests the fish could be around 200 years old.
At the very least, the 39.08-lb fish is big -- breaking the previous recorded weight for a shortraker of 38.68 lbs. “I knew it was abnormally big (but I) didn’t know it was a record until on the way back we looked in the Alaska guide book that was on the boat,” Liebman told The Sentinel.
As ancient as the rockfish may have been, it's hardly a contender for the biggest fish ever reeled in. The titleholder remains a bluefin tuna pulled from the Atlantic, near the coast of Nova Scotia in 1979.
In fact, even the largest cod in the world puts this rockfish to shame. The best caught in Norwegian waters last May reportedly tipped the scales at 103 pounds.
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