Scientists from the University of Cambridge and the University of Florida have finally named a group of mysterious mushroom-shaped animals three decades after they were discovered in Australia.
It took 30 years for scientists to classify them because of their unique characteristics. The Dendrogramma enigmaticaI was discovered by crustacean biologist Jean Just in an Australian seabed.
No living animal looks like the Dendrogramma. But there are three fossils that resemble its appearance: the Albumares, Anfesta and Rugoconites, which all possess disk-like heads and extending channels. These species are widely believed to be extinct more than 540 years ago.
Neurobiologist at the University of Florida's Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St. Augustine, Leonid Moroz, argued experts had to analyze the animals because these mushroom-like animals could affect the existing understanding of evolution.
"It can rewrite whole textbooks in zoology," Moroz told National Geographic.
The animals are less than an inch in length, translucent, and resemble chanterelle mushrooms. Scientists have yet to discover how these animals lived, although previous researchers thought they might have roamed the ocean one by one, instead of sticking together in groups.
The position of these animals in the animal tree is still being debated. Some analysts wanted the creature to stick at the base, for they resemble the earliest aquatic animals and might be descendants of the Ediacaran period, which existed 600 million years ago.
"If this is true, then we have discovered animals which we'd expect to be extinct around 500 million years ago," study co-author Reinhardt Kristensen, an invertebrate zoologist at the University of Copenhagen, told National Geographic.
Further details of the study were published in the Sept. 4 issue of PLOS One.
