No longer extinct
Print Edition
A microscopic marine creature believed to have been extinct for four million years has been found alive and well in New Zealand waters, researchers said on Thursday.
The animal, a tentacled polyp called protulophila, forms colonies inside sea worms and first appeared in the fossil record about 170 million years ago in Europe and the Middle East, government marine agency NIWA said.
The last trace of it was in rocks that were 4 million years old, until scientists found the organism in samples from New Zealand, half a world away from its regular habitat, which were formed just 1 million years ago.
That sent researchers scrambling to check more recent samples and sure enough the polyp turned up in sea worms collected by NIWA in 2008 near Picton, on New Zealand’s South Island.
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