Crazy looking, never-before-seen creatures have been discovered amongst the Antarctic seabed as part of a Youtube documentary called The Secrets of Antarctica.
Discover our latest podcast
The expedition saw researchers using high-tech devices to scan the ocean floor and they were left baffled at the amount of previously undiscovered life being seen for the first time under their watch.
Among the strange creatures were sea lilies called crinoids, a mysterious being only seen before in fossils. The team also managed to stumble upon a spooky sea spider with enormous legs and sponges which are void of internal organs and filter particles out of the water with their porous bodies. Scientist Dr Dave Bowden stated:
The reason is the Antarctic continental shelf has been isolated from the rest of the planet for many, many years. This is a sea spider, which is one of the groups which is intriguing in the Antarctica group system because they’re much more diverse than the rest of the world, they grow very large. There is a tendency in some groups to lean towards gigantism, it’s basically all legs, there’s essentially no body, it’s unlike anything we know about.
He continued:
Here’s an example of another magnificent beast, it’s a polychaete worm, you’ll find them under a rock, but this is much, much larger [than normal]. There’s debate over whether the Antarctic is the reason why these things are larger, or if there are just lineages of this animal that have evolved in the Antarctic and don’t exist anywhere else.
Bowden claimed that the sea lilies were the creatures that excited him most stating that he had never seen anything like it before:
But one of my most fascinating finds from the voyage was on a seamount north of the Ross Sea, where we found an extraordinary assembly of sea lilies – crinoids – which are closely related to sea urchins. The main difference is that it’s anchored in one position.The only place we’ve actually seen these before is in the fossil records, we’ve never seen anything like this before alive on the seabed.
If you want to check out the bizarre creatures for yourself check out The Secrets of Antarctica on Youtube!
