Contemporary records of the rare and critically endangered angular rough shark, Oxynotus centrina (Linnaeus, 1758), from the eastern Adriatic Sea

The angular rough shark, Oxynotus centrina (Linnaeus, 1758), is a poorly known and rare bathydemersal shark inhabiting continental shelves and upper slopes with a significant lack of data and rarely published records in the Adriatic Sea in this century. In this paper, we present 20 new occurrences recorded from May 2015 to September 2021, of which 19 are in Croatian and one in Montenegrin territorial waters. Records of juveniles, subadults and adults are reported. Higher number of records off the Kornati archipelago in the central Adriatic Sea suggest that this area is of particular importance for this species. Furthermore, habitats in the Southern Adriatic might have lower density. Due to the nonsystematic research and nonprobabilistic data collection, it is difficult to establish whether the greater number of records in the continental shelf is just an ostensible phenomenon.