An unidentified shark carcass (minus head, fins and entrails) was landed in Fortaleza, Brazil following its commercial fishery capture off Ceará State in north-eastern Brazil. The absence of key morphological characters precluded traditional identification, necessitating the employment of DNA bar coding techniques. The obtained 639 nts COI sequence fragment perfectly matched six of seven Odontaspis ferox sequences available on the Barcode of Life Data (BOLD) system database, and was 99.2% similar to the seventh.
