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Scientists Found This Mysterious Golden Orb on the Seafloor Nearly Three Years Ago. Now, They Finally Know What It Is
Key takeaways
- NOAA Fisheries In August 2023, scientists found a mysterious object stuck to a rock on the ocean floor off the coast of Alaska.
- What is that?’” Allen Collins, a zoologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), tells Live Science’s Chris Simms.
- Now, nearly three years later, Collins and his colleagues say they finally know what it was.
NOAA Fisheries In August 2023, scientists found a mysterious object stuck to a rock on the ocean floor off the coast of Alaska. They carefully extracted the four-inch-wide, tannish-gold orb and brought it to the surface—but, even then, they still couldn’t identify the unusual-looking specimen, beyond that it was “biological in origin.”
“Everyone was like, ‘What the heck? What is that?’” Allen Collins, a zoologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), tells Live Science’s Chris Simms.
Now, nearly three years later, Collins and his colleagues say they finally know what it was. The enigmatic blob was the remnants of a durable outer layer, or cuticle, and tissue that once attached a large sea anemone to the rock, the researchers report in a paper posted April 21 on the preprint server bioRxiv.