Watch the shark dissection

Thousands of New Zealanders crammed into a museum amphitheatre today to get up close and personal with a real-life great white shark as scientists performed a necropsy in front of the public for the first time.

Children and shark attack victims were among the 4,000-strong crowd sitting in bleachers and filing slowly past the 10ft-long, 660lb ocean predator to get a closer look as it was dissected by scientists from the Auckland Museum.

Another 10,000 people watched a live online broadcast of the two-hour necropsy, during which marine scientists inspected the shark’s stomach contents and measured its internal organs.

The shark was found dead by local fisherman Duan Russell after it had become entangled in a gill net while sniffing around a school of trevally in Kaipara Harbour on Monday last week.

Mr Russell and his 11-year-old son Kurt were there to watch as the great white was cut open on Thursday.

“We like sharks… our family has a lot of respect for them because they’re wild,’’ Kurt told stuff.co.nz.

“We also respect them because we don’t want them to eat us.”

The shark, which was lifted onto the display table by a forklift, was dissected by Auckland Museum marine specialist Tom Trnski and Clinton Duffy, a shark expert from the New Zealand Department of Conservation.

As he cut open the blood-covered creature Mr Duffy told the crowd: “She looks a bit gruesome really, she’s not really at her best…they are beautiful creatures in the wild.”

While they didn’t find any seals or penguins in the shark’s stomach, it was revealed that the adolescent female had at some point chomped on a fishing hook with its line still attached, which the scientists discovered inside her stomach.

The shark’s jaws will be kept by the museum for display, while its stomach contents and DNA samples will be used for future research.

Great white sharks, commonly found in waters off Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, are a protected marine species with diminishing populations.

Dr Trnski said the scientists were "astounded" by the level of public interest in the necropsy.

"It's quite interesting being a scientist and doing someting that we consider fairly routine and not that exciting, to then catch the imagination of the people in New Zealand, Australia and internationally, we were all really astounded by the attention," he told Times Online.

Auckland museum, which aimed to display the necropsy to educate the public about great white sharks, hailed it as a success and plans to do more in the future.

Dr Trnski said: “This was a fantastic and rare opportunity to bring the public face-to-face with a Great White, both to promote the conservation of this magnificent and vulnerable species, and to further our knowledge of Great White biology.”

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