The saltwater fish was a juvenile blacktip shark, George Burgess, director of the Florida Program For Shark Research at the University of Florida, told the Traverse City Record-Eagle.
Mark Tonello, a fisheries biologist from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, said someone might have caught the shark off the Atlantic Coast and kept it on ice while bringing it to northern Michigan.
Another possibility is that the dead shark was dumped by someone who had kept it as a pet, Tonello said.
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