One-in-a-million 'Frankenstein fish' caught in Cambridge Lake

London, May 29 (ANI): A fisherman claims to have caught a one-in-a-million " Frankenstein fish" which appears to be a hybrid of three different species.

Mark Sawyer, 53, said he was fishing for carp when he hooked the odd-looking specimen, which he initially thought was a common brown goldfish.

But on closer inspection he found it appeared to have the head of a roach, the body and tail of a brown goldfish and the rear fin of a bream.

Sawyer, who works as the tackle editor for trade magazine the Angling Times, photographed it before throwing it back into Magpie Lake in Cambridge.

"I have shown the picture to a number of marine boffins who say it is definitely the result of mixed parentage," the Telegraph quoted him as saying.

Dr Paul Garner, a fisheries ecologist, described the fish as truly one-off and said: "I have never seen one in the UK before. It must be at least a one-in-a-million fish and the odds of actually catching it are even greater than that.

He added one of its parents is likely to have been a fan-tailed goldfish that had been kept in a garden pond and released into a waterway.

"Fan-tailed goldfish aren't indigenous to this country and they are not stocked in our fisheries or lakes.

"This means that the parent of this fish would have had to have been released into a fishery, probably by somebody who had it in their garden pond as a pet.

"At some point that fish has mated with a common carp and this hybrid fish in the result," he added.

Another fish expert, Dr Mark Everard, said he thought the odd specimen is the result of a fan-tailed goldfish and a normal goldfish mating and had probably been released into the lake from a private aquarium. (ANI)