Scientists Discover Completely New Order of Marine Creatures Among Sea Anemones

Scientists may have just discovered a new order of marine creatures. Using DNA, they've found that a deep-water creature once thought to be one of the world's largest sea anemones, with tentacles reaching more than 6.5 feet long, is actually part of a completely different order of animals.

"The discovery of this new order of Cnidaria-a phylum that includes jellyfish, corals, sea anemones, and their relatives-is the equivalent to finding the first member of a group like primates or rodents," said Estefania Rodriguez, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The difference is that most people are far more familiar with animals like chimpanzees and rats than they are with life on the ocean floor. But this amazing finding tells us that we have so much more to learn and discover in the ocean."

Sea anemones spend most of their lives attached to rocks on the sea floor and on coral reefs as stinging polyps. In order to actually make this finding, the scientists conducted a four-year study to organize sea anemones in a phylogenetic way, based on their evolutionary relationships, examining their structure and features.

"Anemones are very simple animals," said Rodriguez in a news release. "Because of this, they are grouped together by their lack of characters-for example, the absence of a skeleton or the lack of colony-building, like you see in corals. So it wasn't a huge surprise when we began to look at their molecular data and found that the traditional classifications of anemones was wrong."

In the end, the scientists were able to reduce the sub-orders of anemones from four to two. Not only that, but one species wasn't an anemone at all. Instead, the scientists placed the animal under the sub-class Hexacorallia, which includes stony corals, anemones, and black corals. The creature's new name is now Relicanthus daphneae.

"Even though this animal looks very much like a sea anemone, it is not one," said Rodriguez in a news release. "Both groups of animals lack the same characters, but our research shows that while the anemones lost those characters over millions of years of evolution, R. daphneae never had them. Putting these animals in the same group would be like classifying worms and snakes together because neither have legs."

The findings are published in the journal PLOS One.