People hacked up a rare shark that washed up on a beach and made off with its head and tail. A historian is begging them to bring these pieces back.

• British historian Dan Snow is begging people to return parts of a dead shark that washed up in the UK.

• He said it was not illegal to take its parts, but he urged them to let scientists study it first.

• The smalltooth sand tiger is a critically endangered species of shark native to New Zealand.

A rare smalltooth sand tiger shark washed ashore in the UK on Saturday, and before scientists could get to it, people had already hacked off and taken its head and tail.

The six-foot-long dead shark washed up on Lepe Beach in Hampshire, per The Guardian. British historian and TV presenter Dan Snow first tweeted about it on Sunday.

"So I'm as shark positive as the next woke dude but what in the hell is this fish that just washed up on my local beach where I regularly swim without a care in the world?" he tweeted.

He then tweeted that he was asked by biologist Ben Garrod to secure the fish safely — but before he could get to it, someone had decapitated the shark and made off with its head and tail.

"We have recovered a good chunk of it, but some trophy hunters got there just before us," Snow said in a video he posted on Twitter. "The head, tail, and fin were grabbed before I get assemble a big enough team to drag it off the beach to the nearest road," Snow wrote in a tweet on Sunday.

This was disappointing because the shark was a "once-in-a-lifetime" find in British waters, and its teeth and brain could be useful to study and do analyses on, Snow said.