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“Living Fossil” Found

17th August, 2011 - Posted by Erica - No Comments

New discoveries are found each day and to some point, these discoveries are sometimes pretty amazing. This is just like the newly discovered eel that has been living in an undersea cave in the Pacific Ocean. It is being described as a living fossil because it shows a lot of primitive features according to the scientists that found it. Due to its distinctive feature, scientists have created a new taxonomic family just be able to describe how it is related to the other eels.

This was from a US-Palauan-Japanese team and they are stating that the eel’s features are suggesting that it has a long independent evolutionary history that goes way back to 200 million years ago. The details about the find can be found in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. An 18cm-long female which was collected by one of the researchers while they were diving a 35m-deep cave in the Republic of Palau and it is the animal used as the basis for their new study. But there are also other examples of new eel species made mention in the paper they published.

Affinities of the animal was the first out from the discussion among the researchers. When they got the genetic analysis however, it confirmed that the fish was a true eel or an albeit a primitive one. Some features shows it being more primitive than the recent eels and has even more primitive characteristics from the oldest know fossil eels which made them suggest that it is a living fossil that has no fossil record.

A new family, genus and species was given to the animal in order to classify it and it was given the latin name Protoanguilla palau. The team that composed the ones that discovered the eel were Masaki Miya from Chiba’s Natural History Museum in Japan, Jiro Sakaue from the Southern Marine Laboratory in Palau and G David Johnson from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC and they made a family tree of different eels to be able to show the relationship between the animal and the other eels.

There are a lot more mysterious to prehistoric animals that we would have to discover in time. Being able to find living ones that have survived the times is a great way to study how they survived and be able to understand the circumstances they lived in long ago.

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