Think Jaws meets a kangaroo, with maybe a touch of cute kitten, and you've got the aptly named pocket shark - the newest and rarest species found off the US coast.

Surprised scientists found a tiny, young version of the extraordinarily rare shark that was fished out of the deep Gulf of Mexico in 2010 with lots of other creatures in a government research trip. The dead specimen spent more than three years in a giant freezer waiting to be identified.

It turned out to be only the second of its species ever seen. The first pocket shark was found 36 years ago in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Peru. This pocket shark was a male, maybe a few weeks old, about 14cm long.

Strangely, this type of shark has two pockets next to its front fins. It's not quite like a kangaroo, which uses its pouch to carry young, but few species have pockets this large - about four per cent of the shark's body. "It's cute," said Tulane University biologist Michael Doosey, who co-authored a study in a zoological journal identifying the shark.

"It almost looks like a little whale," he said.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries biologist Mark Grace has spent more than 30 years going through bags upon bags of fish to identify them. It took him more than three years to get to near the end of the freezer.

"I wasn't really sure what it was," Grace said. "That pocket over on the pectoral fin, I had never seen anything like that on a shark."

It's a small miracle that he was not thrown away. A couple of times, the lab with the freezer lost power.

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