Recently, a "Weird Fish: Unidentified Marine Creature!" was hooked near Ballina. Ballina is nestled on the Far North Coast of NSW at the mouth of the Richmond River (the longest navigable river on the coast of NSW), Australia.

The source on this reads:

We decided to go fishing and try out our recently acquired boat. My husband, son and I were fishing at Ballina on the Richmond River. It was around the change of tide, I had my rod in the rod holder, when suddenly the line took off, the rod bent over and I nearly fell over trying to get to it before the rod went in!

I grabbed the rod, hooked it up and started trying to reel her in! About half an hour later, after pulling the boat around a bit, I finally got what ever it was up to the surface and realised that it had gotten caught up in our anchor rope, Damn!

My husband grabbed the camera and started taking pictures of what I caught, we haven’t seen anything like it before!

At first we thought it was some kind of Sting Ray, but it had no tail, instead it had what looked like the front of a Manter Ray? and the head was different to a Ray.

Unfortunately we didn’t get it in the boat to have a really good look at it, and had to cut the line because of the Anchor rope.

Check out the pictures and see if you know what it is?

Click on image to see uncropped version

Click on image for full size version

Is it a Pacific (also called an Atlantic) manta or giant manta (Manta birostris, Dondorff, 1798), that has lost its tail – with a misidentified eye? Below is a drawing of a complete example.