The first was a study showing that fish can jump out of the water and eat birds right out of the air. I know that flying fish jump pretty high out of the water, and I wouldn't be surprised if a shark could catch a bird while breaching, but I wouldn't expect a successful catch from anything smaller. It turns out that African tigerfish, which live near the Botswana and Zimbabwe borders with South Africa, go after barn swallows. Scientists originally went out to observe migration behavior but tracked around 20 successful attacks on birds, thus proving a regional myth that previously hadn't been given much validity.
Since the first filming of a live giant squid in 2012, sightings and catchings are still few and far between… until a Japanese fisherman accidentally caught one while fishing for yellowtail. It's not the radioactive squid that inevitably proved to be an urban legend, but this one was a good 13 feet long and 350 pounds, so it's still pretty darn scary. It didn't survive much past its capture, but the catch might help scientists study these creatures considering how difficult they are to catch.
And finally, fish markets have become an unlikely but increasingly common place to find rare species; in proper coelacanth fashion, a shark species thought to be extinct was found at a fish market in Kuwait. The first (and only) specimen of the smoothtooth blacktip shark was found in 1902, and another wasn't identified until 2011 at the eastern fish market in Kuwait. Other rare and locally protected species, such as sand tiger sharks, whale sharks, and green sawfish, have also been found at fish markets around the Arabian peninsula, despite legislation preventing shark fishing.
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