“Remember, the dissection is for science. Have you all learned something so far?”

There was a general chorus of agreement.

“Then it’s been worthwhile,” she stated. “And now it’s time to take a look inside the great white’s body.” She returned to the necropsy table and made a long cut along the shark’s abdomen. With Lasith’s help, they lifted back the thick layer of skin and tissue to reveal the shark’s enormous liver beneath. It was the size of a human and filled almost the entire gut cavity. Unlike other fish, sharks lacked gas-filled swim bladders that controlled buoyancy. Instead, they relied on giant, fatty livers packed with oil to keep them afloat, which was why they sank when they died and rarely washed up on shore.

As Mark filmed the oil oozing out of the organ, Elsa said, “You may be surprised to see there are no bones inside the great white, only cartilage. This is the case with all sharks. It allows them to be light and flexible in the water, while also enabling them to become the largest known extant fish species in the oceans. Whale sharks, for instance, can reach a length of sixty feet and a mass of twenty tons. That’s about the weight of three elephants, thirty cattle, or a whopping two hundred and fifty people. Thankfully, they pose no threat to us as their diet consists mostly of plankton and small squid or fish.”

Elsa, Lasith, and four other colleagues heaved the great white’s liver from the gut cavity and plopped it down on a blue tarp stretched across the floor.

After catching her breath, Elsa said, “All right, ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls. I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally made it to the stomach! This is my favorite part of any dissection. Some of you older folks out there might recall that in Jaws Richard Dreyfuss found a crushed tin can and a license plate in the stomach of a tiger shark. Although that’s just a movie, some strange stuff has indeed been found inside the stomachs of sharks over the years, including old boots, car tires, a bag of money, and even a full suit of armor! Any guesses as to what we’ll find today?”

“A dolphin?” Julie called out.

“I hope not. But anything’s possible. So let’s get cracking, shall we?”

Elsa slit open the shark’s stomach and nearly retched at the putrefying smell. Scrunching her nose in disgust, she sifted a gloved hand through the partially digested sludge inside the muscular sack.

“Much of this appears to be…half-digested whale blubber,” she said, tasting the offending odor in her mouth. “Which means this great white had likely been scavenging on a floating whale carcass not long before it died…” Her fingers brushed something hard and heavy. She removed a piece of bone the shape and size of a small boat propeller. “Ah ha! I was right! This is a whale vertebra. By the size of it, I’d say it was part of a backbone at least twenty feet long. We’ll send it off to a laboratory for proper identification.” She handed it to Lasith, then stuck her hand back into the goop. A few moments later she cried out again when she discovered the rest of the fisherman’s line that had trailed from the great white’s mouth. She pulled it fist over fist until a nasty fishing hook emerged from the rotting whale blubber. She showed it to Lasith. “What do you think?”