A 10-year-old boy from Maryland was bitten by a shark at a resort on Paradise Island, the Bahamas, on Monday afternoon. The Royal Bahamas Police Force issued a news release saying “the boy was bitten on the right leg while participating in an expedition in a shark tank at a local resort.” The boy was taken to Doctors Hospital in Nassau in serious but stable condition and was recovering from surgery. He was to be airlifted back to Maryland. The attack occurred at Atlantis Paradise Island Blue Adventures. Stuart Cove’s, the organization that runs the shark diving program, said it…

What’s a Greenland shark doing in Belize? Marine scientists aren’t exactly sure how to answer that question. What they do know is that one was found there recently, swimming thousands of miles away from its natural habitat. After studying  pictures, they determined that the shark they found in the Caribbean was indeed a Greenland shark, the longest-living vertebrate in the world. Adult Greenland sharks are usually about 24 feet long and weigh 2,200 pounds. They are predatory. Greenland sharks aren’t exactly a garden-variety shark. They usually live thousands of feet underwater in the pitch dark near the Arctic, and are…

A shark attacked an American woman snorkeling in the Turks and Caicos and bit off her leg last week. She was reported in serious condition in a local hospital. The woman, 22 years old and from Connecticut, was snorkeling about 3 in the afternoon with a friend at the Bone Yard dive site in Princess Alexandria National Park near Providenciales when the shark attacked, according to the Royal Turks and Caicos Island Police Force. (Her name and home town were not released.) The police said they received a phone call reporting that a woman “had her leg bitten off by…

The bad news is that the megalodon shark was bigger, faster and fiercer than we had thought. In fact, it was 52 feet long, weighed 70 tons, swam faster than a great white, and could devour a 26-foot orca in just five bites. The good news is that the megalodon became extinct about 3.6 million years ago. Paleontologists and marine scientists have long tried to judge the real size of a megalodon. They had to make their estimates based on megalodon teeth discovered in the 1860s. Shark skeletons are largely cartilage, so they don’t result in many fossils. But now…

A shark attacked a Long Island, New York, lifeguard while he was in the water, playing the victim of a shark attack in a training drill during the Fourth of July weekend. The lifeguard, Zachary Gallo, 33, suffered bites on his hand and his chest, but was treated at a local hospital and then released. Local authorities closed Smith Point Beach, and another one just to the east, after the attack “due to dangerous marine activity.” They reopened the beaches the next day. The shark, four or five feet long, attacked Gallo about 10:15 on Sunday during a lifeguard training…