Years ago, Jessica Pate got a phone call from a shark scientist she knew.

He'd found something interesting.

He was like, hey, we just had a dead Manta Ray washup, or someone towed it to shore, actually.

He was like, I thought you should know.

We're about to, like, cut it up for samples.

Jessica is a marine biologist.

She studies Manta rays off the coast of Florida, and she knew this was a very

rare find. Because they're negatively buoyant, so if they stop swimming, they sink. So if they're

to die offshore, they sink, and they're made of cartilage, so they decompose really rapidly.

And Jessica had been looking for an intact dead mantaray.

She had a colleague who was trying to prove that the mantarays in the Western Atlantic were a new species.

Without the body, it would be a lot harder to prove.

And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, please, please don't cut into it.

I was like, just let me get there.

So I was on the boat when I got the call, so it took me like two hours to get down there of them, like, sitting and watching this dead manta ray.

So I get there and convince them to like, please, let's not cut into it.

Let's just take measurements and photos.

So we do all that. And then we finally find a place that we can keep the dead manterey, which is basically in a freezer where they store

dead whales. So my partner was out of the country at the time. So I had my intern go steal his truck, and we put this

dead Manta ray in the back of his pickup truck and drove two hours down I-95.

To the whale freezer.

To the whale freezer. We had to stop and get gas at one point, and we just left this, like,

...