“Then, I was on a trip and Sharon called me saying ‘they’re going to destroy Rosie!’, so I put up my hand thinking, what the fuck am I doing? I had no idea what I was taking on,” Tom told VICE. We saw her in this big, dark shed, but it was full of toxic chemicals, her tank had been shattered and it was leaking. “We went down there about ten years ago to look at the abandoned wildlife park, to see if we could make a dinosaur park out of it. “It was Sharon’s fault,” he gestured to Crystal World’s retail manager. So how on earth did Tom come to acquire Rosie the Shark?

I had to meet Rosie the Shark (she has a name, obviously) AND the legend who had saved her from leaking formaldehyde abandonment and brought her home to Crystal World. This goddamn country never ceases to amaze. You could probably understand my disappointment when I found out that the abandoned wildlife park in question had been bulldozed, and the shark had been removed from its dingy neon resting place.Īnd you could probably imagine my excitement when I discovered it had been taken in by an eccentric natural history entrepreneur, removed in an extraction mission for the ages, pumped full of glycerine, and airlifted to its now-forever home: Crystal World – wholesale crystal and fossil emporium, dinosaur theme park, and, now, decaying shark sanctuary. The shark found internet fame via Youtube and urban explorers, the media found it, and the story had been recycled over and over across local lore ever since. It was an old story, and I was apparently the only one in the country to have missed it. Weird, interesting and slightly off-putting – for over a decade the musty shark had sat in suspended-carcinogenic-motion in an abandoned wildlife park, left alone by a series of failed handovers and administrative errors. Rosie's Formaldehyde Era | Credit: Don Kransky

The crystal world