Brittle Stars with Thousands of ‘Pig Snouts’ and Thorny Nest of Teeth Found

Scientists have recently described a new family of brittle stars with thousands of "pig snouts" from one specimen from a seamount off New Caledonia.

A WION report specified that theoretically, senior curator at Museums Victoria in Australia, Tim O'Hara had come to Paris to map a faraway seamount's biodiversity.

In practice, this would mean sifting a plastic barrel of preserved brittle stars that float in 95 percent ethanol. For weeks, O'Hara sorted through usual five-armed species of echinoderms that are associated with starfish, many of which he had previously seen.

One specimen O'Hara collected from the bucket looked different from any brittle star he had previously seen. It had a thorny nest of teeth, and quite unusually, eight arms.

Typically, he said, brittle stars have five a few have six, and the very strange one has more than 10. He added, to abruptly have eight arms, was special.

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'Echinoderm'

The senior curator said he believes echinoderm, which was collected on an earlier expedition to New Caledonia's seamount east in the South Pacific, is representing a totally new family of brittle starts nailing down from an ancient lineage that dates back to the Jurassic and survives to present.

He, as well as other researchers, described the Ophiojura exbodi species in the study, Relict from the Jurassic: a new family of brittle-stars from a New Caledonian seamount, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal.

According to researcher Christopher Mah, from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and an expert on sea stars who reviewed the said research, if he found the thing, he would have just died, adding, the discovery "is all teeth."

'Pig Snout' Articulations

After he took a genetic specimen from the toothy, eight-armed star, O'Hara put his odd box where he's storing samples that puzzle him.

In connection to this, a phylogenetic analysis showed that the singular lineage of the star emerged in the late Triassic or Jurassic roughly 160 million to 200 million years ago.

He then, contacted Ben Thuy, his longtime collaborator and a National Museum of Natural History, Luxembourg paleontologist, and told him about what was described as his "eight-armed dilemma."

Relative to such a dilemma, O'Hara wanted to know if the paleontologist knew of a similarly shaped star in the record of fossils. The latter asked to be sent a piece of the discovery's arm.

As a result, according to a similar News Week 365 report, the scans showed the arm plates of the brittle star, joining together in a chain to form their internal skeleton, each of them had one pair of holes, a nerve hole, as well as a muscle attachment hole.

Together, as described in the study, the passageways bore a peculiar similarity to a specific set of nostrils. O'Hara explained, such an occurrence is called pig snout articulations. This, he added, was their internal joke name although it is quite descriptive.

Up to 2,000 Feet Underwater

For O'Hara, the east of New Caledonia's deep seamounts promises to be a living creatures' museum that has survived since the dinosaurs' time.

Here, explained Thuy, roughly 1,000 to 2,000 feet underwater, researchers have discovered decapod crabs, nautiluses, flowerlike crinoids, as well as other creatures once they are believed to be extinct.

Related information is shown on Deep Marine Scenes' YouTube video below: