The oceans continue to surprise us. Even as we struggle to preserve species being lost to pollution or over-fishing scientists continue to find new species - and sometimes new "old" species. Case in point, a truly prehistoric eel found in a deep underwater cave, 115 feet below the surface, in the island nation of Palau. Palau is a popular dive tourism location, a site for many scientific studies, and a Pacific island trailblazer having established a shark sanctuary that covers the entire island. But with all this aquatic visibility, no one had ever seen this
species of eel before. A kind of half-eel, half-fish, the newly discovered creature has anatomical features that distinguish it from the current 800 species of eel today. With a second upper jaw bone and only 90 vertebrae, features only found in fossilized specimens from the Cretaceous period, it is also unique because it has a full set of gill rakers - a cartilaginous feature found in most bony fishes - and not eels - that aid in filter feeding. The new species' lineage as a true eel was determined by examining its mitochondrial DNA. Read Full : Palau
