It’s amazing the things people leave behind when they’re packing up and abandoning a place for good, but ‘preserved carcass of great white shark’ has got to be up there.
If you ever go to a wildlife park you’d probably expect most of the animals there to still be alive and kicking, albeit at a safe distance so they can’t harm people, but one place had a giant shark sitting in a tub of formaldehyde as a main attraction.
Luckily for people who are interested in this sort of thing it’s not some kind of Deep Blue Sea style shark that could eventually break out and terrorise the neighbourhood, this one is well and truly dead, and has been for a long time.
As for how it got there, the great white shark got caught in tuna fishing nets off the coast of Australia and couldn’t get back out again.
With no safe option to get her free, there was no choice but to humanely kill the shark, who we shall henceforth refer to as Rosie because that’s her name.
Australian wildlife park Wildlife Wonderland took an interest in taking Rosie’s carcass on as an exhibit in 1998, but she had to take a little detour for an autopsy first after reports surfaced of a person going missing off the coast.
Once the autopsy was done and dusted, Rosie ended up in her new home at Wildlife Wonderland where she was kept in a tank full of formaldehyde to keep her body preserved.
Sadly, it seems as though the centre bit off more than it could chew and abandoned plans to expand to showcase more marine life, meaning it fell into disrepair.
The place closed down in 2012 and had to give up all of their animals, but since Rosie was dead nobody ever bothered to move her and for years she remained floating in her tank amidst the decaying ruins of the abandoned wildlife park.
Even though the place was abandoned, Rosie remained a popular exhibit as some people broke in to have a look round and see her, including YouTuber Lukie Mc in 2018.
This spiked a whole new wave of popularity for Rosie, but also the wrong sort of attention as once word got around that there was a five metre long shark just chilling in a tank for anyone to see, people took the p**s and nearly destroyed it.
There’s a video floating around of someone throwing a TV into the tank and using a hammer to try and smash the glass.
Thankfully they didn’t succeed, but if they had the joke would have been on them as formaldehyde is toxic, but poor Rosie was still left all alone.
Fortunately, efforts to rescue Rosie were spurred on and in 2019 she was acquired by the Crystal World Exhibition Centre and is once again on display for people to see.
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