A massive fish known as the “harbinger of doom” was found sulking off the coast of California last weekend — marking yet another end-of-the-world forewarning in recent weeks.
To make matters worse, the mystical fish was dead.
The 12-foot oarfish carcass — which is rumored to be a sign of impending earthquakes — was spotted by kayakers and snorkelers exploring San Diego’s La Jolla Cove.
The “doomsday fish” delivered on its promise — a 4.6 earthquake rattled Los Angeles just two days after its discovery.
Seemingly unafraid of its bad luck, however, the crew cuddled up next to the fish’s body and smiled in pictures with it before reporting their findings to UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Officials are performing a necropsy to determine what killed the juvenile oarfish and sent its body into shallow waters.
Oarfish are deep-sea dwellers and are rarely seen by humans. Even their bodies rarely float into shallow waters, making last week’s discovery extremely rare.
Only 20 oarfish have washed up in the entire state since 1901, the oceanography center said.
They are “strikingly large, odd-looking fish” with a long, silvery, ribbon-shaped body that can grow to be 30 feet long, according to the Ocean Conservatory.
They also have creepy large eyes and “foreboding red spines that stick out to form a crown-like cluster.”
Although bone-chilling enough on its own, the doomsday fish’s visit to California is just the latest in a series of bad omens that struck this summer.
Last week, Utah’s Double Arch — a 190 million-year-old geological structure — spontaneously crumbled.
Two weeks earlier, a 1,100-year-old pyramid in Mexico buckled under intense rain, which descendants of the Purépecha peoples who built it warned was a “bad omen” of impending doom.
