Read some biology today; it’s good for you!
It’s not often that a new animal phylum has been described, but a new paper in PLoS ONE apparently does just that, basing the phylum on two enigmatic species, dredged up from the deep sea, that can’t be placed in any existing phylum. This may add one more to the 35 phyla that already exist (see the list here, and please look. It’s nice to review the major divisions of life.)
The paper is by Jean Just et al. (all authors are from the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen), and the reference and pdf, which is free, are below.
What we have is something that looks like a cnidarian (jellyfish, corals, and sea anemones) or a ctenophore, but with a stalk. (Some cnidaria do have a stalk). But it has features that keep it from being placed in the phyla…
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