Often, when we hear a new species discovery, it’s hard to imagine anything bigger than bacteria. But Mother Nature still has many big secrets, and we are far from finding them all. Scientists have just discovered a new species of hammerhead swimming in the South Carolina coast.

“Here, we’re showing that the scalloped hammerheads are actually two things,” Quattro said. “Since the cryptic species is much rarer than the [more widespread one], God only knows what its population levels have dropped to.”

The new species, named the Carolina hammerhead (Sphyrna gilbert) looks almost exactly like the scalloped hammerhead, but it differs genetically and contains 10 fewer vertebrae, according to researchers.

Knowledge of this shark dates back to the mid 1960s when renowned curator of the Florida Museum of Natural History Dr. Carter Gilbert had written about the shark. He described it as a peculiar scalloped hammerhead missing the 10 vertebrae of the Sphyrna lewini.

The shark he described had been found near Charleston. It had remained at that same museum, and the research team lead by the University of South Carolina fish expert Joe Quattro was able to study its morphology. They published these initial findings in the scientific journal Marine Biology in 2006.

To confirm the existence of this new species, though, the research team also collected 80 sharks that resembled the scalloped hammerhead. They were able to confirm the distinct differences of the species through their DNA, also noting the Carolina hammerhead was smaller. More than 50 of the collected 80 sharks belonged to this new species.

These findings were published in a study in the journal Zootaxa. The researchers were also able to confirm that the newly discovered species is much more rare than the scalloped hammerhead.

Outside of South Carolina, we’ve only seen five tissue samples of the cryptic species,” Quattro said in a release from the University of South Carolina. “And that’s out of three or four hundred specimens.”

Like most shark numbers, the scalloped shark population has dropped significantly in recent decades. “Populations of sharks have greatly diminished over the past few decades. The biomass of scalloped hammerheads off the coast of the eastern U.S. is less than 10 percent of what it was historically,” Quattro said.

The main contributing factor to this decline has been the strong demand for shark fin soup, a Chinese delicacy that takes out roughly 100 million sharks out of the oceans per year. Good news, though, according to some an environmental group called WildAid, shark fin soup consumption has dropped 50 percent in the last two years.