It is not common to find a specimen and not be able to classify it within the species table , but it is what has happened to a team of scientists from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark).
What is this organism? Experts discovered a miniscule mushroom-shaped marine animal off the coast of Australia in 1986 and, after careful analysis, have been unable to classify it into any of the known subdivisions of the animal kingdom.
These new species measure only a few millimeters and have the shape of a flattened disk with a stem and a mouth at the end and, a priori, have been described as two new animal species named: Dendrogramma enigmatica and Dendrogramma discoides . Furthermore, it is an asymmetric multicellular organism , with a dense layer of gelatinous material between the outer skin and the inner cell layers of the stomach.
In the work, which has been published in the journal Plos One , study co-author Jorgen Olesen states that " discovering something like this is extremely rare , perhaps it has only happened four times in the last 100 years."
