A team of experts from New Zealand's National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has discovered a microscopic marine creature in waters near this country that was believed to be extinct for millions of years.
It is a tentaculate polyp known as protulophila that forms colonies inside some sea worms. The last clue to the existence of these organisms, which first appeared in the fossil record 170 million years ago in what is now Europe and the Middle East, was found in 4 million-year-old rocks.
However, the researchers did track them down in samples from New Zealand, only a million years old.
Encouraged by the finding, they studied further in collaboration with scientists from the Museum of Natural History, in the United Kingdom, and the University of Oslo. Now, they are convinced that they have found their presence in one of them recovered in 2008 near Picton, in the South Island of New Zealand.
According to Dennis Gordon, marine biologist at NIWA, “the discovery of living specimens of protulophila, beings related to corals and anemones, is an example of how our knowledge of fossils can lead us to improve our knowledge of the current biodiversity. The next step will be to find an organism in good condition to try to sequence its genome ”.
