Meet the rarely-sighted frilled shark. Described by some media outlets as "hideous", the prehistoric creature looks part-eel, part-shark and shocked the fisherman when it was found in waters off south-eastern Victoria.

Last month, David Guillot, skipper of the trawler Western Alliance, was fishing near Lakes Entrance in Gippsland when he pulled up a specimen in water more than a kilometre deep.

Mr Guillot was fishing for dory and sea perch in waters about 1.1 kilometres deep when he came across the shark.

"I've been at sea for 30 years and I've never seen a shark look like that," Mr Guillot told Fairfax Radio on Wednesday.

"The head on it was like something out of a horror movie. It was quite horrific looking ... It was quite scary actually."

He described the shark as being about 1.5 metres long and "like a large eel ... the body was quite different to any other shark I'd ever seen".

The species is more likely to be found in cool, temperate waters and seems to avoid warm water, said Mark Meekan, shark biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

"There are usually three main spots it is found, in waters off New Zealand, near Japan and along the coast of the British Isles, down through Spain into northern Africa. However, there are some maps that show distributions that encompass the Victorian coast," he said.

The frilled shark has six gills on either side that wrap around and almost join underneath. These are what give the shark its name.

It was first described in 1884 and its closest related species is the cow shark, which dates back about 95 million years.

It is capable of swallowing prey more than half its size and it eats squid and octopus.

Its teeth are described as backwards needles and it is capable of extending its jaw so that it can swallow everything whole.

Like an eel, it can turn back on itself.

"I remember seeing one off Victoria a while ago and also when I walked through fish markets in Taiwan," said William White, research scientist at the Australian National Fish Collection, CSIRO.

"I know they occasionally see them at the surface, because a lot make vertical migrations at night time, as they follow prey up and down in the water column," he said, adding that its eel-like swimming motion makes it quite unique among sharks.

"It's certainly unusual and rare. I wouldn't call it hideous at all."

It joins the list of the more bizarre and rarely seen sharks that inhabit the ocean's depths, such as the goblin shark, hauled from the Gulf of Mexico last year.